Help with Drive Overallocation

perfect777

Young grasshopper
Mar 18, 2020
53
15
KC
I recently added a 3TB drive to my system and setup a new "Continuous" folder dedicated to just this drive (no other folders use it).

I set my storage limit to 2600GB, but it continues to tell me that I'm overallocated. I originally had the limit size to 2700GB (3TB = 2720 usable GB).

What am I doing wrong or misunderstanding?

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Your 3TB is not really 3TB.
Windows uses space on all disks.
Your disk is 2.72 TB max.
Se the GRAY space bar graph, you have other stuff on the drive, Reformat the drive.

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My Standard allocation post.

1) Do not use time (limit clip age)to determine when BI video files are moved or deleted, only use space. Using time wastes disk space.
2) If New and stored are on the same disk drive do not used stored, set the stored size to zero, set the new folder to delete, not move. All it does is waste CPU time and increase the number of disk writes. You can leave the stored folder on the drive just do not use it.
3) Never allocate over 90% of the total disk drive to BI. Leave at least 50GB free.
4) if using continuous recording on the BI camera settings, record tab, set the combine and cut video to 1 hour or 3 GB. Really big files are difficult to transfer.
5) it is recommend to NOT store video on an SSD (the C: drive).
6) Do not run the disk defragmenter on the video storage disk drives.
7) Do not run virus scanners on BI folders
8) an alternate way to allocate space on multiple drives is to assign different cameras to different drives, so there is no file movement between new and stored.
9) Never use an External USB drive for the NEW folder. Never use a network drive for the NEW folder.
10) for performance do not put more than about 10,000 files in a folder, the search and adding files will eat CPU and disk performance. Look at using a sub folder per camera (see &CAM in bi help)


Advanced storage:
If you are using a complete disk for large video file storage (BVR) continuous recording, I recommend formatting the disk, with a windows cluster size of 1024K (1 Megabyte). This is a increase from the 4K default. This will reduce the physical number of disk write, decrease the disk fragmentation, speed up access.
Hint:
On the Blue iris status (lighting bolt graph) clip storage tab, if there is any red on the bars you have a allocation problem. If there is no Green, you have no free space, this is bad.
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Last edited:
Thanks - I decided to delete all of the recordings from this drive and try again. I am aware that the usable space in a 3TB drive is 2.72TB (I mention that very point in my original post).

I set the limit size to 2600 and this cleared the over-allocation. I still don't understand why it over-allocated itself the first time - I had 0 files on the drive initially and it only went into over-allocation AFTER it started recording items. I didn't change anything...

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  • Wow
Reactions: Flintstone61
Make sure you have restore points turned off on that drive. That can eat up space quickly as you start to load video on it.

Thanks for this advice - but they were already disabled (I deleted any restore points on that drive just in case...)
 

  • Leave more free space....try 2400GB
 
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Reactions: JDreaming
Don't forget to go into the recycle bin, properties, and set the drive in question to say 100mb max size. Hit APPLY when done.

On a big 3TB drive, you will have a ton of wasted disk space reserved for the recycle bin.

Do this for ALL drives to clear up allocated slash wasted space.

Good call! I just went and changed this. Never considered how this works before...