to NAS or not to NAS?

[rocknrolla]

Hi Everyone

I'm a recent BI user, and I've got most of my setup complete but I haven't been able to decide between options for 24x7 recording.

At the moment, it's set up with Deepstack and only recording on alerts, this wasn't intended as the end goal, just proof of concept and for home automation purposes.

Originally I'd intended on purchasing a WD purple drive to use as DAS storage on the recording PC (a HP SFF, currently only with a 500GB M.2 drive) however I do have a NAS drive with lots of spare capacity. The NAS drive has room for another two drives and I already have two WD Red drives I can use, so I'm undecided about how to configure it.

So my question to you all is this - I believe the most efficient thing to do, electricity wise would be to add a large WD Purple drive to the BI PC, but rather than outlay on additional hardware, would you recommend making use of the NAS?

I only have 3x 3Mp cameras, and as the NAS drive is switched on anyway I figured I could have the NAS do the 24x7 recording via the surveillance station software (I'd only need to buy a single cam license), and just use the PC for alerts / home automation with BI, this method would mean a bit more electricity use but would give me some redundancy - the devices are stored in completely different locations so if I was to have a break in and they took one device along with the footage, they probably wouldn't take the other.

Or, I could have the BI PC use the NAS drive via SMB or iSCSI via the "Stored" folder, but I imagine with this method it will be regularly moving large files to the NAS across the network, causing a fair amount of traffic and the NAS drives to spin up when they would probably be in low power mode for most of the day in usual circumstances. I think if BI had the configurable option to only send to the Stored folder during specific hours I've have made my decision and ploughed ahead, but I'm interested in hearing what you all think would be the most efficient configuration.

If using the NAS and spare WD Reds, are there any considerations for what would work best in terms of the array or formatting for power efficiency, or would you just use a single drive and not bother with RAID at all?

Thanks in advance

 

[biggen]

The simplest way is just stuff as many local drives into the BI PC and use them. It’s easy to setup, cheaper to do, and easier to maintain.

That is what most of us do. If you need a NAS for other purposes then that’s fine. But I’m inclined to use local storage unless you have a monster camera system you need recording for or have RAID requirements.

 

[th182]

The simplest way is just stuff as many local drives into the BI PC and use them. It’s easy to setup, cheaper to do, and easier to maintain.

That is what most of us do. If you need a NAS for other purposes then that’s fine. But I’m inclined to use local storage unless you have a monster camera system you need recording for or have RAID requirements.

Same here. Plus my BI PC can run independent of any other machines so I always have video recording. I have dedicated UPS units for BI and the POE switches. So even in power outages my security systems are fully functional.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

 

[SouthernYankee]

Use a local drive as NEW folder to record the video files to. Then set up a STORED folder on the NAS.

====================================
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.
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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[eeeeesh]

Use a local drive as NEW folder to record the video files to. Then set up a STORED folder on the NAS

That is what I do. I recently moved from a 200 watt Super Micro home server to a 'mini itx' build along with a new 5 drive Synology NAS. I am running Blue Iris and Plex from the new machine and it has a SSD for the OS and a 1 TB 2.5" drive for the "new folder" of Blue Iris. Then everything gets move to a 12 TB Drive in the NAS. It has worked great since I built it (about 6 months ago now) and I am extremely pleased with the Synology NAS. CPU on the new system is an i5-10400 and it uses about 35 watts total. The NAS (5 drives in it) uses about 60 watts

this is the case I used - not a whole lot of room. I could install a single 3.5" drive directly over the motherboard and fan but opted not to in order to lower temps and noise