Merged/Spanned Disks in BlueIris - Possible?

samplenhold

samplenhold

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Aug 8, 2018
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Spring, Texas
I am updating my BI Server and want more storage space for clips. A past incident showed me just how important it is to me to keep clips longer than I currently do. With the costs of WD Purple HDDs being what they are, I was thinking of reusing three 4TB drives I have laying around until the prices get more reasonable. I know that may not happen, but it is worth the try to me.

I was thinking that instead of having three more drives at 4TB each, combining those three drives into one 12 TB volume, like a spanned volume or a Storage Space simple volume.

I have been reading up on this and one of the entries in the Windows Forum states that "Some OEM or third‑party tools expect "normal" disks and may not understand Storage Spaces volumes."

I have looked through the BI help file and found nothing addressing this issue. Checked this forum and also did not see anything about it.

Does anyone know if this would be a problem? Has anyone done this? Any pointers?

Thanks Bob
 
I am not sure that BI is particular about the type of disk, the most important is the DB file, which is recommended to be on a a fast local drive. You need to look at what happens with a spanned disk if one of the drives fails as I suspect that it does not fail very gracefully! It has been a while since I used any spanned disks perhaps it has improved? Also before you put some possibly old disks in an spanned array I would highly recommend that you run diagnostics on them to check their health. I would think that some sort of raid setup might be better than spanned, some research is recommended if you want true fault tolerance!
 
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I e not really kept up with spanned or storage space so don’t know if it’s any diff these days but in the old days if you lost a single disk in that config you lost the lot.

Why not just add and allocate each disk to BI as individual disks and then config your cams to record to the various drives. My system only has 2 drives and this is what I do but I logically split them over the drives so that if 2 cams are looking at the same space then I config 1 to record to 1 drive and the the other the other. That way if I lose a disk then I hopefully still have footage from the other cam.
 
Just to add I’m sure I read about somebody using the windows built in feature to span disks and then use the resulting space in BI. Windows will just allocate it a drive letter which you can then configure in BI.
 
I’d just add them to Windows individually and change your storage in BI to point cams 1-4 to drive D:, cams 5-8 to drive E:, etc.. Easy to do and setup.
 
I did this.

P

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

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?
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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...
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It’s not free though
 
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Thanks for the info.
 
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Blue Iris will even let you record to a network share so I am sure whatever spanning solution you find will create a new drive letter in Windows, and Blue Iris will be fine with it. As others have noted, the main concern is "what happens to the spanned pool if a drive fails?" I used to use StableBit - The home of StableBit CloudDrive, StableBit DrivePool and the StableBit Scanner with Blue Iris a long time ago but I don't remember what they said about drive failure. These days I just split my cameras between HDDs because that keeps it simple and I fully understand how a disk failure will be handled.
 
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I currently have three 10TB WD purple HDDs in my original BI server that I built in 2018. In this new build I will have those three plus two new 14TB WD purple drives. That will almost double my current capacity. Adding three 4TB drives as one 12TB drive would make dividing up cams easier between six drives that are roughly the same size versus five large drives plus three small drives. I want each cam to have roughly the same time span on the HDDs. It seems to me that just dividing up the current 23 cams between those six would be fairly easy. That would be four cams per 10TB drive and also on the 12TB spanned drive. Then five on each of the 14TB drives. This should give me about 4-5 weeks of video storage which is what I would have liked to have had back in September.

I suppose I could put one each on the 4TB drives and put a sixth on one of the 14TB drives. I think that is what I will do. Seems like the simplest thing to do. I do have a few more cams to place but will not be able to get to that for some months.

The case holds 12 HDD drives, the motherboard has 6 SATA connections, and I have an HBA card that can handle 8 SATA connections. I plan on getting only two more 14-18TB drives when they are available and the price is not so unreasonable. One to add and one to replace the three 4TB drives. That would give me 90-94Tb.
 
I started with a RAID set up, but then decided to just combine them into JBOD. I don't remember how many drives I have spanned, but BI just sees it as the assigned drive letter and doesn't care.
 
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Bruce_H said:
I hope that you don't mind losing it all when one drive craps out!
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I was more worried about losing footage due to time deletion than a drive crapping out. I originally had three 8TB drives in a RAID 5 set up, which allowed for 16TB of storage. I now have a JBOD of 58TB that, depending on a camera's schedule and triggers, allows me to hold over a month on a system that has 30-40 cameras.
 
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Bruce_H said:
I hope that you don't mind losing it all when one drive craps out!
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This is the reason why I like using fuse style file systems. You can fuse multiple drives together and in the event of a drive failure on the fused system, you only lose the data on that one specific drive. The rest of the data on the other drives is still intact and readable.

I do this with my Frigate host. It writes to a NAS where I have two 12TB drives fused together via mergerfs. RAID 1 is overkill for my application. I'd rather just have more space available for recording so I like fuse in this scenario.
 
just thinkin out loud here ,,,Is it practical to add the drives on a SATA PCIe card with 3-4 SATA interfaces? if you have a modular Power Supply you can add Sata power cables.
of course there is the issue of where to stuff 3 drives. may a generic drive enclosure with cables hanging out everywhere.
 
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Flintstone61 said:
just thinkin out loud here ,,,Is it practical to add the drives on a SATA PCIe card with 3-4 SATA interfaces? if you have a modular Power Supply you can add Sata power cables.
of course there is the issue of where to stuff 3 drives. may a generic drive enclosure with cables hanging out everywhere.
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I have some added this way. I use this PCIe card.

 
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biggen said:
This is the reason why I like using fuse style file systems. You can fuse multiple drives together and in the event of a drive failure on the fused system, you only lose the data on that one specific drive. The rest of the data on the other drives is still intact and readable.

I do this with my Frigate host. It writes to a NAS where I have two 12TB drives fused together via mergerfs. RAID 1 is overkill for my application. I'd rather just have more space available for recording so I like fuse in this scenario.
Click to expand...
Interesting, must look into that, probably a feature of your NAS, never heard of it on anything I have worked on!
 
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samplenhold said:
I ended up just mounting each as its own drive letter. I used this to get more than the six SATA connections on the MB.

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Is that going to run SATA drives right? it appears as though it also is compatible with SAS?
In my Crazy Eddie get it while they last Hurry before they're gone! Storage toilet paper hoard mode.... I ordered an enclosure for 2 drives. Now I think I should have gone bigger. My 2-8tb 7200 RPM WD 82PURZ'S are idle with the optiplex 9020 taking over for BI this week. It's got 9 TB of Video storage, might be enough for 3 weeks.
 
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