Questions about how BI 6 handles video storage drives

Mickey Lane

Mickey Lane

n3wb
Aug 11, 2017
22
0
I'm planning on migrating away from BI 5 on a Windows 10 box with six cameras, mostly Reolink 10 Mpixel. I set the video to max resolution and 10 frames per second. Key frame interval is 10-20.

Old box is Intel i7-377K with 16 Gbyte RAM, 1 Gbyte C drive (Seagate 1HH162), 6 Tbyte D drive (OOS6000G). I can't find much about this last drive other than it's sort of related to Seagate). Mixed success with this setup. A lot of times, it just stops recording in the middle of some event. I realize this is my problem, not BI's. I hope.

New will be AMD Ryzen 7 5800X (X570 AORUS Master, 8 cores) with 32 Gbyte RAM, 1 Gbyte C drive (WD_BLACK SN750) and <TBD> storage drives.

Options are Linux with <something> DVR or Windows 11 and BI 6.

My primary question is about BI 6 and how it handles video storage drives. I have the ability to install up to 3 WD_PURPLE disks. WD_PURPLE is available in 2, 4, 8, 6, 12, 18 Gbyte sizes with prices to match. I would prefer several smaller drives over one large drive. Eggs in one basket sort of thing.

With multiple drives, is there still this deal where there's a primary drive with something periodically moving old video clips to secondary drive(s)?

The X570 is supposed to support RAID on some subset of SATA connectors. Can I create a motherboard RAID for storage? I know how RAID works but my experience is with hardware controller boards, not the motherboard stuff.

If not using RAID, can I set up BI with one storage disk, say 4 GByte, and add more later if needed without having to completely re-design the install?

Related to storage, I've had poor experience with what BI records and am leaning twards having it record for longer periods which of course will mean more storage. I need to figure out a happy medium between non-stop recording vs event triggered. Non-stop is not a very attractive option but at least I'll get ALL of any event. If I can ever find it :)

Speaking of triggering, It's been my practice to turn off everything I can inside the camera and let BI do all that needs to be done. No on-screen displays, triggers, zones, time syncs, etc. I think I'm getting BI to use the second stream to detect stuff and then, when triggered, record using the first stream but there's a lot that I don't understand here.

Thanks for any comments
 
Do you plan on running AI?
Somethings to consider.
If you can install three dives why not install them all using the largest you can afford!
You can configure each camera to write it's BVR files to a separate drive or file location if need be.
There is no point in moving files to a storage location if that location is on the same physical drive. Even moving the archives to another drive in the same box will only achieve wearing out the other drive in my opinion!
 
+1 above - better to spread cameras across multiple drives so if one fails, you don't lose all the footage.

Moving video from one drive to another in the same computer is wasted overhead and premature wearing out.

RAID and BI are not a good combo.
 
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Mickey Lane said:
I don't know enough to answer properly. If it can reliably distinguish between people walking and wind blown vegatation then yes.
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Yes the built in AI in Blueiris V6 is capable of that, it may not be 100% but it will certainly dramatically eliminate that sort of false alert! I still get the occasional squirrel that it think is a person.
 
Mickey Lane said:
Why is this? That a drive is RAID or not shouldn't even be known to BI. I think.
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People here that have used RAID in that past and had a drive fail have said it takes DAYS for RAID to do its thing when a new drive is put in and that is DAYS of no video being recorded while it does its thing to be RAID.

While it sucks to lose that video, you can be up and running again much faster by just swapping out a failed drive not running in RAID mode.
 
wittaj said:
People here that have used RAID in that past and had a drive fail have said it takes DAYS for RAID to do its thing when a new drive is put in and that is DAYS of no video being recorded while it does its thing to be RAID.

While it sucks to lose that video, you can be up and running again much faster by just swapping out a failed drive not running in RAID mode.
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I don't understand this. With RAID 5 (3 disks of equal size, 2 for storage + 1 for parity (simplified explanition)), when one drive fails, you switch over to RAID 0 and continue running with no safty net. Swap out dead drive and the merge back in runs concurently with ongoing operations. When it's done (and I can't see days) then it reverts to RAID 5. The trick is knowing when a drive fails.

The drawback to this is the drives all have to be the same part number (or worst case, size). With the 'assign cameras to drives' scheme, you can use pretty much any drives but there is no safty net at all.
 
I am just sharing with you the experiences I have seen people share.

We have some really good tech folks here and they don't run RAID for BI but do run RAID in other aspects of their life.

I think something about the weak BI DB may come into play as well.

If you have overlapping coverage of cameras and spread cameras across the drives equally based on field of view, you don't lose as much if a drive fails. For example I have two LPR cameras and I put one on each drive.
 
Mickey Lane said:
I don't understand this. With RAID 5 (3 disks of equal size, 2 for storage + 1 for parity (simplified explanition)), when one drive fails, you switch over to RAID 0 and continue running with no safty net. Swap out dead drive and the merge back in runs concurently with ongoing operations. When it's done (and I can't see days) then it reverts to RAID 5. The trick is knowing when a drive fails.

The drawback to this is the drives all have to be the same part number (or worst case, size). With the 'assign cameras to drives' scheme, you can use pretty much any drives but there is no safty net at all.
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If you want to do RAID 5 then best buy a couple of spare drives ahead of time to keep as spares, it is unlikely that the same drive will still be available when one of the drives fails
 
Bruce_H said:
If you want to do RAID 5 then best buy a couple of spare drives ahead of time to keep as spares, it is unlikely that the same drive will still be available when one of the drives fails
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Based on my experience, this is excellent advice.

I still have a box of twelve 500 Gbyte drives that were left over from some READ project. I was going to use three just experiment but after reading the motherboard manual, the board only supports 0, 1, and 10. None of these are very useful for my current purpose.
 
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