Anyone running Blue Iris on a mini pc? What HDD are you using?

D

dannieboiz

Getting the hang of it
May 13, 2015
508
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In effort to reduce electricity cost I moved blue iris from the PC with an i7 6700 and 32gb of RAM to a mini PC with an i7-1360p, 32gb ram. To my surpise without a GPU the CPU is only running at 6% idle and never saw it went past 40% even with AI detection while, the PC with a GTX1650 handling AI would constantly spike to 100% and crashes. I did minimal change when moving the system over, just restored Blue Iris from the other machine.

Anyways, the Mini PC have 2 NVME slots and a single sata for 2.5 hdd. I only have a single 1TB NVME in there now partiion with 700gb for recordings and moving the data to a NAS for storage. Trying to figure best approach to take the recording duty off the single HDD. Are there 2.5" surveillance drives available or any other drives that's suitable for the task?
 
I built a mini ITX system with Ryzen 5 and 32GB RAM. I am using the Velkase Velkase 3 the smallest case I could find. Only two fans. The CPU fan and the GPU fan. Works well and does not over heat over load.
 
dwheeler said:
I built a mini ITX system with Ryzen 5 and 32GB RAM. I am using the Velkase Velkase 3 the smallest case I could find. Only two fans. The CPU fan and the GPU fan. Works well and does not over heat over load.
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My original plan was to do an mITX build with an i5 13600 hoping to ditch the power hungry GPU but I had the MiniPC sitting around so I decided to test it first w/o spending a bunch of money, so far in the last 24 hours it's been pretty solid. I'm going to let it do its thing for a week before calling this a win.
 
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I use a mini pc and write to an internal SSD drive that is not my NVME system drive, BUT I consider that only temporary storage for fast scrubbing of alerts/recordings within recent hours. I have BI configured to move the recording files to a Synology NAS where I have traditional magnetic drives that provide storage for 7, 14, or ~30 days (using different folders) depending on the camera. The response time to view recordings from the NAS is still acceptable, but obviously not nearly as quick/clean when "scrubbing" through a recording on the local SSD.

Note that I have BI move files off the SSD when there is still a lot of storage left on the local SSD drive such that if my network or NAS has even temporary issues (e.g. if I simply reboot my router or Synology NAS) that BI can continue recording for another couple hours before the SSD would fill up, crashing all of Windows with BI. Please trust me, bad things happen if your local SSD fills up to 100%. Ken has made some improvements to hopefully avoid that going forward, but don't risk. Just give yourself extra room as a buffer.

I also accept that this is not how SSDs are generally intended to be used since they have a finite lifetime (if you didn't know that already). I am accepting that my SSD will eventually die sooner than I would like, but it's worth it to me just to have the faster access to alerts & recordings.
 
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carteriii said:
I use a mini pc and write to an internal SSD drive that is not my NVME system drive, BUT I consider that only temporary storage for fast scrubbing of alerts/recordings within recent hours. I have BI configured to move the recording files to a Synology NAS where I have traditional magnetic drives that provide storage for 7, 14, or ~30 days (using different folders) depending on the camera. The response time to view recordings from the NAS is still acceptable, but obviously not nearly as quick/clean when "scrubbing" through a recording on the local SSD.

Note that I have BI move files off the SSD when there is still a lot of storage left on the local SSD drive such that if my network or NAS has even temporary issues (e.g. if I simply reboot my router or Synology NAS) that BI can continue recording for another couple hours before the SSD would fill up, crashing all of Windows with BI. Please trust me, bad things happen if your local SSD fills up to 100%. Ken has made some improvements to hopefully avoid that going forward, but don't risk. Just give yourself extra room as a buffer.

I also accept that this is not how SSDs are generally intended to be used since they have a finite lifetime (if you didn't know that already). I am accepting that my SSD will eventually die sooner than I would like, but it's worth it to me just to have the faster access to alerts & recordings.
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Yah I was wondering if there are survelliance drives but I guess not. SSD are cheap enough for a couple hundred bucks if it last 3 years that's fine. My plan is exactly as yours, I too hvae a Synology NAS, the plan is to move the 6TB HDD to the NAS and create a storage pool out of it for BI. If either drive dies it's easy enough to swap out.

I have Dual 2.5Gbe on the mini PC and the NAS actually have quad 2.5Gbe, Camera on 1 NIC to VLAN for Camera 2nd NIC on local VLAN that talks to the NAS, or possibly just connect the mini pc adhoc to the NAS which will save me a couple 2.5gbe ports on the switch. I think it should help when I have to scrub data over the network as it'll get full 2.5gbe just for the recordings.
 
dannieboiz said:
Yah I was wondering if there are survelliance drives but I guess not. SSD are cheap enough for a couple hundred bucks if it last 3 years that's fine. My plan is exactly as yours, I too hvae a Synology NAS, the plan is to move the 6TB HDD to the NAS and create a storage pool out of it for BI. If either drive dies it's easy enough to swap out.

I have Dual 2.5Gbe on the mini PC and the NAS actually have quad 2.5Gbe, Camera on 1 NIC to VLAN for Camera 2nd NIC on local VLAN that talks to the NAS, or possibly just connect the mini pc adhoc to the NAS which will save me a couple 2.5gbe ports on the switch. I think it should help when I have to scrub data over the network as it'll get full 2.5gbe just for the recordings.
Click to expand...
I have been using a 1TB Samsung 840 SSD with Blue Iris for thirteen years now. It has been reading and writing 24/7/365 that entire time. Only last year did it show a few issues. So, I just reduced the space BI uses by 100GB, and it has been fine since then. I run seventeen cameras with BI. I also use a couple of 2TB 970 EVO plus NVMe drives with Blue Iris. The video gets pushed to each one, with the 1TB 840 SSD being last.

Recently, I setup an AOOStar GEM10 Mini PC with three Gen 4 NVMe drives in it for BI. Using three 2TB 990 EVO drives. That works well. And I specifically got the Aoostar Mini PCs because they held three Gen4 NVMe drives. Luckliy, I bought all this before prices skyrocketed.

I was going to permanently switch over to the Aoostar Mini PC, from my old Dell PC with a Gen8 core i5, for Blue Iris. But, since FiOS is ending Cable Card support, the Aoostar WTR Pro, four 3.5 inch bay I was going to use for my Plex recordings, I am now going to use with Blue Iris. And just repurpose those two 2TB 970 EVO Plus, Gen3 NVMe drives. And several old 4TB and 2TB 870/860 EVO SSD drives. To use in the Aoostar WTR Pro. Assuming BI will work fine with an AMD Ryzen 7 5825U processor. It does work fine with the Ryzen 7 6800H processor I have in the Aoostar Mini PC. But, the 5825U is a lower power CPU and less capable. But, I won't get around to messing with it for a few weeks to see how well it will work with BI.
 
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