Just added a couple of DAS units to my BI server, but ran out of BI storage folders. What are my options? SOLVED

P

prsmith777

Getting comfortable
Dec 23, 2019
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Colorado
I added a couple of 8 bay DAS units to my BI server for extra storage running on Windows 10. All the discs are showing up with drive letters down to Z. I have a total of 24 discs now, but I just realized I only have 15 available storage folders in BI.

Is there a way to add more storage folders in BI, maybe in registry settings?

What other options do I have to use my new DAS units?
 
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For anyone stumbling upon this post down the road, I solved this problem using Drivepool by Stablebit. It cost 29.95$ one time fee.

Drivepool allows you to combine multiple drives into one larger drive and assigns them a drive letter in windows, so it acts like a single drive. Pretty slick.

But I ran into a problem: Windows has a limit of 26 drive letters, A-Z. Since I had 24 drives I couldnt assign all my new drivepool drives a letter (only had 2 left). Without a drive letter, the drivepool drives couldnt be seen by Blue Iris. Solution was to mount the 24 drives in empty NTFS folders.

mount.png

I had not heard of this option before today. I created 24 empty folders in the C: drive and names them according to which physical disc they were attached along with the disc serial number in case I needed to find them later. That freed up all my drive letters. I could then assign the drivepools proper letters. Worked out great.

drivepool.png

I did have to go back into Blue Iris to the storage settings and increase the size of my storage folders.
 
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Wow 480 TB, that is a lot of storage, what is the need for some much storage! What case did you use that has room for that many drives?
 
prsmith777 said:
Anyone have any experience with drivepool?
Click to expand...

I used DrivePool for 12 years on two PCs but have finally removed it for good during my latest upgrades. While it did a fair job on my PCs used as servers purely for local PCs/laptop overnight disk image backups, I had the odd issue when I tried to use it for more frequently accessed files (corruption, missing files, lack of change notifications causing issues with some software, resource leaks). I would not use if for CCTV based on my experience but that's just my results. It does have some limitations that have been discussed for a while (Beware of DrivePool corruption / data leakage / file deletion / performance degradation scenarios Windows 10/11) but they are more common on general PC mixed usage scenarios.

The final straw for me was when replacing those two physical PCs with VMs on new hosts. Even the smallest change such as adding an additional physical or virtual drive would cause the DrivePool activation to be lost and the pool to go into read only mode until I could get the license unlocked. I don't need parts of my infrastructure going read only on a whim and given the benefit of VMs for me is being able to have HA across servers and tweak virtual hardware as needed this would be a much more frequent issue. On the physical hosts I had this happen only a few times but it was still annoying when no other software with activation tied to those PCs suffered from this.
 
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Bruce_H said:
ow 480 TB, that is a lot of storage, what is the need for some much storage! What case did you use that has room for that many drives?
Click to expand...
I got a couple of these units Product Detail They have a power supply and fans and trays for 3.5" HDDs Connect via SFF 8644 cables. Had to add a Broadcom 9400-16E HBA card to my BI server for input.

JAGE6BT8HD-DE_18.jpg

I have 48 cams now with plans to end up with max of 64 cams. Just wanted a large amount of storage to keep data available for a couple of months. With this new upgrade in storage I am using about 1% storage per day, so about 100 days worth. Will go down as I add more cameras
 

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