Multiple Hard Drives

mlapaglia

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My current Hikvision NVR will "round robin" the 4 hard drives inside of it. Basically it is only recording to one hard drive at a time, and when it fills up, it moves to the next one. The advantage I see is the other 3 drives get powered down when they aren't being accessed. I would think it wears the drives down evenly also.

Is there a way to make BI go between different drives in a similar fashion? So I can let Windows spin drives down that aren't being used to save power?
 
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I suppose it depends on the drive and read/write/idle percent-of-day, but a quick google produced ~22W active per drive and another thread 1.2 kWh per day for an active 4-drive RAID array. Where I live that would be approximately 20 cents per day, which isn't so much, but it's still worth knowing if you are looking for ways to save energy.

It seems like per-disk sleep control would have to be a function of OS, and I haven't seen for Windows. interesting it appears to be more common among NAS specific OS's.

Doing single drive round-robin wouldn't you risk losing a large swath of video with a drive failure?
 

mlapaglia

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Windows will automatically turn disks off that haven't been used in x amount of minutes.

I've got 9 drives in the system with the possibility to move up, so any way to save power is nice.

Not so worried about losing cam footage though.

Maybe an option for it to fill up a drive then move to the next one. I can't find anything in the settings that would allow for it though.
 

bp2008

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I've been using a program called StableBit DrivePool to remap two drives into one drive. It worked great and it filled the drives one at a time so it would probably achieve your goal. Not free though.
 

mlapaglia

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I wonder how well the Storage Spaces feature works if I put the disks into JBOD mode and have BI write to that. I'll give that a go.
 
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