Combine Storage Drives into Logical Volume?

[Gerald Martin]

Good evening.

I am interested in combining 2 hard drives into a logical volume. 12TB WD Purple Pro and 18 TB WD Purple Pro. (my boot drive / "new" storage is Samsung 980 Pro SSD)

I am aware that there is risk of losing all data if one drive fails. However, I haven't seen a way to store on "new" and then archive footage to multiple drives.

Some links I found so far:

How to use Storage Spaces in Windows 10

Storage Spaces is a great Windows feature that allows users to group different types drives to create a single larger logical storage with data protection technology. Today we'll walk ...

www.windowscentral.com

How to combine multiple hard drives into one volume on Windows 10

You can group two or more hard drives on your Windows 10 PC to create a single large volume to store your data. Here's is how to do it.

www.windowscentral.com

Any suggestions?

Gerald Martin

 

[fenderman]

Good evening.

I am interested in combining 2 hard drives into a logical volume. 12TB WD Purple Pro and 18 TB WD Purple Pro. (my boot drive / "new" storage is Samsung 980 Pro SSD)

I am aware that there is risk of losing all data if one drive fails. However, I haven't seen a way to store on "new" and then archive footage to multiple drives.

Some links I found so far:

How to use Storage Spaces in Windows 10

Storage Spaces is a great Windows feature that allows users to group different types drives to create a single larger logical storage with data protection technology. Today we'll walk ...

www.windowscentral.com

How to combine multiple hard drives into one volume on Windows 10

You can group two or more hard drives on your Windows 10 PC to create a single large volume to store your data. Here's is how to do it.

www.windowscentral.com

Any suggestions?

Gerald Martin

You are better off simply splitting the load and storing 2/5 of your cameras (or storage capacity) on the 12tb drive and 3/5 on the 18.

 

[sebastiantombs]

By moving files around for "archive" I assume you mean from the "new" directory to the "stored" directory. If that's the case, moving them is pointless and results in additional work for the CPU and the drives. It's much easier to just use the "new" directory, set the size about 10% less than the full formatted drive capacity and let BI handle deletion when it's necessary. If you need to archive some important video, like an incident, you can have a "stored" directory on one of the drives specifically for that use case.

 

[wittaj]

+1 on above.

You are asking for trouble doing that. Someone came here once trying that and completely messed up the system.

You have two drives, so split the cameras across the drives and just put all in NEW.

Only "archive" or STORED if going to a NAS. Moving them around on an HDD is simply wasting CPU and potentially bogging down the system with all those moves.

 

[Gerald Martin]

Ok, maybe I didn't completely understand the architecture. I thought that the DB and recent footage gets stored to SSD (NEW), then all the recordings get stored to STORED.

Can I make a NEW directory on each spinner drive? I'm fine with the idea of recording some cameras to each disk.

Gerald

 

[wittaj]

Yeah, do not put NEW on the SSD and just put it all on the HDD. Performance will be fine.

 

[sebastiantombs]

You can make a "new" directory on as many drives as you want and the machine can hold. Saving an video to an SSD drive is a bad idea because the life expectancy of an SSD drive is based on write operations. Video never stops writing. Yes, they've improved over time but their life is still based on writes.

 

[Gerald Martin]

I read on the forum here to set the "Allocation Unit Size" to 1024 when setting up the hard drive? Is this better than "default"?

 

[wittaj]

Yes, because the video files are large. The default size is too small because that is assuming people will have small and large files. But if all the files are over 1024 in size, no reason to be smaller. You could even make it bigger if you like.

 

[Gerald Martin]

Great. Got that done. Now, I'm sorry, this is probably obvious, but when I go into the settings panel in BI where can I add another "new" storage location? What I'm seeing appears to allow linking "new" with a single directory.

 

[sebastiantombs]

Click the three dots next to the actual path and you get a file explorer panels. Just select from there. It's also best to duplicate the directory structure that BI uses, /Blue Iris/New and so on.

 

[Gerald Martin]

Got it, thank you.