New PC for BI - HDD size limit

[Dave Lonsdale]

Such a lot of great feedback! One thing not to lose sight of is that although I bought this PC 3 or 4 years ago to be BI capable, it‘s also used by my wife and other stuff so the point of this thread is to make the right choices and do the right things when buying my new BI PC Xmas present. All this good advice is definitely pushing me in the right direction, helping me to get a new slick and smooth running PC for BI without completely zeroing out the bank account.

Yes, I do see that the free space on the C drive seems to have shrunk a bit... It seems my train of thought was misguided. The reason I put the BI New files on it was my assumption that CPU time would be saved by creating new BVR files as quickly as possible on an SSD and that continuously building these files on a drive with no moving parts was a good thing to do. Then moving complete (4GB at the moment) files in one go to the HDD would wear it out less quickly. Was I wrong? Also, if complete BVR files are moved, does this mean that this cluster size thing doesn’t apply? My knowledge is very superficial to say the least.

The AMD radeon GPU was a standard fitment in this PC. I have no idea how to use it but can’t see why I would want to.

All the cameras are wired and I think the no signals are merely me messing about with the NIC camera connections etc. I will reset to make sure more don’t occur.

I record 24/7 which is why I started out worrying about the 2GB limit (solved, thanks) . Skipping (or perhaps delayed frames) does occur on the console.

In all the many tests that I have ever done, for a given bit rate, the video quality always suffers when they are all iframes. Likewise when using VBR instead of CBR with the newest 5442 cameras.

 

[Dave Lonsdale]

Nearly forgot, the reason I haven’t reduced the substream resolution any more is that I like to capture all motion including foxes, badgers, rabbits and even voles and shrews. I stand to be corrected, but using the current substream resolutions doesn’t seam to be the problem. I blow hot and cold bringing in motion alerts from the cameras (cold at the moment). I have no interest in AI or SMD but want the clearest motion images I can get after dark.

 

[SouthernYankee]

As you want a standalone PC for BI. Two ways too go, get a new PC for home use, and use the current PC for BI. Or the other way around, get a new/used PC for BI.

As the system you are currently using just about works for you. As stated before go for a used HP or DELL business computer from EBAY. Get an i7-6700 or better with 16 GB memory. If it comes with an SSD good. If not add a 120 GB SSD and at least a single 4TB WD purple disk drive or better an 8TB. There is absolutely NO reason to go to an I7 10 generation processor for your load. There is no reason to build a new computer for BI with your requirements.

 

[sebastiantombs]

Lowering the substream resolution will have no effect on motion capture. I regularly catch cats, raccoons, possums and squirrels using the lowest possible resolution.

The major reason for moving New off the SSD is that the constant writing of video files can significantly shorten the life of an SSD. Their life is determined by writes, not reads, and video write constantly, with no breaks. While the write number is pretty high, in the billion range I think, video recording will definitely hasten that limit being reached. It also amkes BI look back and forth, from drive to drive, when retrieving video.

 

[Flintstone61]

I don't use Defender but there should be a setting, somewhere, in it to not scan selected items/directories.

In an unrelated thread, I'm excited to announce my Ubiquiti nano station wireless Bridge got wired in today. I was able to bring in 2 remote cameras off an Amcrest 4k Hybrid DVR. I was also able to get them on BI. using channel 1 and channel 2 with substreams enabled as well. I'm thrilled!

 

[Dave Lonsdale]

Thanks again guys. Lots to think about now... Perhaps as you say the best thing is to get another PC for family use. Either way, although not massively serious, my next step will be to diagnose the reason why video playback is not as smooth as it should be. I’ll have a cautious tinker with Defender, free up some SSD space, try physically unplugging 12 of the 13 cameras and in in any case buy another 8MB RAM.

 

[IAmATeaf]

The PC you have right now should be more than capable, if in your shoes I’d buy the wife a new laptop or desktop if she really prefers a desktop instead. My wife wouldn’t be without her laptop.

 

[Dave Lonsdale]

Decisions decisions... One easy thing to put to bed is buying a laptop for my wife - a definite no no. She likes to sit at a desk and being a former secretary in the age of manual typewriters, wants a clunky keyboard.

What‘s pushing me in the direction of another (used) PC for BI this morning is having peered again inside the existing PC box. You guys have pointed out the limitations of a SSF PC - there isn’t a spare drive bay to add a big purple and in any case no empty sockets of any type on the motherboard to plug in anything else apart from another 8MB RAM card. I have already used the two USB3 sockets for ethernet adapters hanging out at the back.

One other point, I’m not convinced that my existing PC is designed to run continuously - after a little over three years I am on my third CPU fan.

Oh, and if I get a PC with Windows 10 Pro I will be be able to operate it from my armchair with the laptop using Microsoft Remote Desktop - won’t I??? Please comment on whether or not this has problems. At the moment I use TeamViewer to do this which has three problems: 1. the useable screen area is reduced below 1920x1080, being inset within my laptop border, 2. I‘ve more than once had to convince TeamViewer that I’m not using it commercially (fair enough they say OK and switch me back on) and 3. it gobbles CPU load.

 

[sebastiantombs]

RDP of any type is CPU intensive. You can easily view BI on your laptop using UI3 which is built into BI as the web client. The major problem is "tinkering" with BI. If you have the room it's probably easier, and less CPU intensive, to simply admin BI locally.

I think you need to find better CPU fans. I have yet to replace one in my "main" desktop which has run 24/7 for almost five years, or longer now. I'd suggest getting the biggest one that will physically fit into the case. Mine has two 60mm fans on it but it's in a full, actually oversized, tower case. Another trick is to clean them every six months or so just to keep dust build up down.

 

[IAmATeaf]

My BI PC runs headless and is in the loft so I use RDP to manage/maintain it, after finishing what I’m doing I always logout rather then just disconnecting.

 

[Dave Lonsdale]

To conclude on this thread, despite all the brilliant advice from all you guys, I went ahead and bought a new HP 290 G4 MT i5-10500 8GB 256GB SSD Windows 10 Pro desktop to which I have added another 8GB RAM and a WD 8TB purple HDD. I am very pleased with it. After searching for a used PC from a supplier here in the UK meeting the minimum spec you recommended and accepting the fact that I also needed to buy a new 8TB HDD, at best I was only going to save around 10% on the overall price.

It has 1 PCIE-1, 1 PCIE-16, 2 more bays and a third spare SATA port. Everything is brand new and hopefully will still have a performance that measures up for many years. It’s in my main living room, looks very smart and is very very quiet.

I will also confess that, although not “strangled” (to use SothernYankee’s word), I have again put a 100GB BI “New“ folder on the SSD in line with Ken Pletzer’s help instructions. I also justified this to myself by comparing the huge difference in the cost of replacing the SSD instead of the HDD and that in any case, all the cells in my old PC’s SSD are all good after 3 1/2 years.

I have failed on one benefit though - I told myself that newer technology giving a smaller CPU load would save enough energy to zero out the extra cost after a few years. Totally wrong. It consumes an average (measured over several days) of 33.2W compared with an average of 29.4W for the old PC. Not that it matters, but at an average current THD of 43%, the power quality is dreadful.

 

[sebastiantombs]

The problem I find with SSDs failing is that they just "go". There's no recovering anything and you're stuck starting from square one again. I clone my SSD bot drive weekly and probably should do that more like daily, just because of that. The generally accepted "best practice" is to keep the DB on the boot drive and all video on large storage drives with platters.

 

[IAmATeaf]

There’s also no real value in moving things around within the PC itself, so in your case moving New to Stored, just write the video clips direct to the HDD and be done with it

 

[matchewready]

Exactly, I don't understand why you put a 100GB BI “New“ folder on the SSD. Just put it on the 8 TB drive and save all the cpu cycles of transferring it from the ssd to the 8TB

 

[CCTVCam]

a lot of the members on the forum are retired. Please read the wiki.

Choosing Hardware for Blue Iris

Buy refurbished. Don't build or buy new. The most cost-effective Blue Iris computers are refurbished business-class systems such as "HP EliteDesk" and "Dell OptiPlex". You can usually get a good deal by searching [URL='http://www.ebay.com/']Ebay[/URL] for specific CPU model numbers, and...

ipcamtalk.com

It is best to stick with intel as the CPU has a graphic processor built in.

Beware Intel F processors ie 10400F. The F indicates it has no inbuilt graphics capability. Why they make processors so difficult to identify, I don't know but they do. So check whatever Intel processor you're considering has inbuilt graphics or more importantly supports Intel QuickSync.

Without inbuilt graphics you'll need a graphics card to simply get a display to work, nevermind encode video and that will cost in both GC price and electrickery usage. Without QuickSnyc you'll need a graphics card to encode. Whilst the encode quality is slightly better, it's slight and the penalty as before is purchase price and electickery usage. The general opinion is QuickSync is the way to go for CCTV, so look for a processor with both QuickSync and Inbuilt graphics. The aforementioned 10400 is a good performer for a reasonable price in non F spec (around £169 for the non F model). It's an i5 and if you want to compare performance there are some websites out there will allow you to comapre the performance of all the CPU's ever produced to aid you in choosing the one that fits your needs. I suggest you use those in conjunction with this forums CPU wiki. There are better and worse processors out there and which suits you will depend on the size of your proposed system.

Like You I think I'm going to build as in the UK on ebay, even 2nd hand refurbisehd Dell Optimplex etc are expensive and poorly specc'ed for the money. The biggest obstacle is the OS system cost. If you know anyone with a spare unused key you're laughing.

 

[IAmATeaf]

I got my HP G2 from eBay, think it was around £105 but can’t remember, as it was an ex business machine I just installed W10 and it just activated.

Only had an i5-6500 CPU but got it over a year ago now so was a decent enough deal at the time but you do have to keep scanning eBay, think it took me over a month, at the time the average price for the same was well over £150.

 

[Dave Lonsdale]

I feel like I’m being shot at and should hide, especially since I know nothing about how PCs work. Nevertheless, I can’t resist trying to defend myself:-
1. If using a “New“ folder and putting it on the SSD is wrong, why is it that Ken Pletzer says, “...New on fastest storage possible because of frequent access...”
2. Surely recording 24/7 with 13 cameras and getting on for 100MBit/s network data causing continuous activity on a HDD having moving parts must be worse than transferring blocks of complete files even though it’s a video surveillance drive.
3. A HDD failure would cost nearly 10 times as much as as replacing the SSD.
4. I could cope with the risk of losing 100MB (half a day) of crucial recordings in several years time if the SSD does wear out. In any case I have backup micro SD storage in the cameras.
5. I have no problem with CPU cycles, it shows 3-4% on the local console.
6. The PC uses a wiki recommended i5-10500U CPU and has integrated Intel HD graphics 630, the GPU shows 5% on Task Manager.
7. I haven’t the foggiest idea what QuickSync is and so can’t comment on that.

I do want to increase my knowledge, so I will read and learn from all feedback contradicting what in my case is an attempt at common sense.

 

[sebastiantombs]

1 - An SSD drive of an appropriate size, say on the order of multiple TB, would be far more expensive than a platter drive probably by a factor of at least 10 or 20. The time lag between the "fast" SSD and a platter dive is imperceptible to the normal human and I suspect that idea goes back to the days of the 386/486 CPU and that era hardware and long before 2MP, and up, cameras became the norm.

2 - Platter drives, optimized for surveillance use, are optimized for constant writing which is what is required.

3 - See number 1

4 - The loss of data will happen at the worst possible moment, Murphy's Law. Even with a daily image of the SSD drive, it's still somewhat of a PITA to restore the data back again and that is yet another potential point of failure when doing so.

5 - Moving data around does use CPU, maybe not a lot, but some. It also comes at the risk of data corruption. Additionally, Blue Iris spends time reconciling the database every time a file gets move, another potential failure point.

6 - You appear to be operating efficiently already, but most of us are always tweaking things.

7 - Quicksync is a technique to unload video decoding/processing from the CPU to free it up, reduce loading. It is Intel's term for hardware acceleration of video.

 

[SouthernYankee]

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.
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 and read.
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. The New folder must be on an internal drive.


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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[Flintstone61]

If using a “New“ folder and putting it on the SSD is wrong, why is it that Ken Pletzer says, “...New on fastest storage possible because of frequent access...”

I think it's worded "New" on fast local storage. Means not out to a USB drive or a network drive. It means local SATA connector on the motherboard. Just get a big Terabyte drive and let Windows and BI run on C:\ make the Terabyte drive X:\ or Z:\ or something.