wd purple pro noisy drive seek

TVille

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From a technical standpoint, I have no idea if defragging a video drive is a good idea or a total waste of time. I had a pair of 3 & 4 TB drives that I would hear working their butts off when I was in the office with the BI computer. The noise stopped as soon as I touched the mouse on that computer. It seemed to run almost all the time. I turned defragging off on those drive, and virtually no more sound from the drives. I do not notice any issues pulling up videos from either drive. So, I leave defrag off.
 

Flintstone61

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One must not allow one's rational thinking to "have" to make sense of 5-15 cameras being written across 2-3 or 4 platters, on multiple tracks and sectors nearly simultaneously. Windows being a good mathematician, will think logically, " hmm all files named Camera 1 are spread across x number of sectors and x number of tracks. that = XX% of fragmentation. As soon as somebody finishes a defrag on a BI drive, it's gonna start writing the way same again. Is it Broke? Did you fuck with it? Can U Blame someone else? ----> You poor bastard.
 

Flintstone61

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What little experience i have with Bi, it's been my experience, that 2 drives perform better than one when you get into the teens of Cameras. Which my Condo system eventually grew to. My 8Tb Purp will record all 17 cameras. But I like the performance improvement I notice when I get more demanding in reveiwing a weekends activity on many camera's with 2 drives.
 

Mike A.

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So I ended up running the defrag on mine. Took about 2 1/2 days. Looking at disk in resource monitor before and after, write speeds do seem to have increased overall vs the numbers that I saw prior to. But that's just anecdotal from glancing at the numbers in both cases. Could be attributed to other things happening at the times. Again no practical noticed effects before running or after. Didn't have any problems in actual use before @ 84% fragmented, don't really see much if any benefit after @ 2%.
 

Flintstone61

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Well shiver me timbers Laddie.
Looks like mines been running ever since I reinstalled windows. I forgot to turn it off for the 2 big platter drives. It's been optimizing on it's own weekly since I put this thing into service.
So now I turned optimization OFF on the 2 platter drives.
LOL
Lets see how long before weird shit shit starts happening. 10/27/21

Screenshot 2021-10-27 122330.png
 

Flintstone61

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One wonders if that was happening back on my i7-3770 with the WD Blue drive working it's ass off to record 13-15 camera's, and then trying to "optimize" a SMR drive.
it's working hard then you walk up and review tape......then it freezes or shudders, or stutters.

 

SouthernYankee

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A while ago I did a test on a 4 TB purple drive at 90% full with 15 cameras writing to it continuously. Most of the BI files were between 1.9 GB and 4.0 GB. The windows defragmenter ran for a few days than quit, the drive was still 21% fragmented. You really can not defragment a drive that is being continuously written too with so little free space.

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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.
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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