How should I setup New, Stored, and Alert folders?

[oceanslider]

I am setting up my first BI system. I am totally new to BI and security cameras.

I have a new i5-8500 HP Prodesk with a 256 M.2 for Windows 10 and Blue Iris only. This will be a dedicated PC for BI only. It has for storage one shucked 8tb drive from a WD Easystore.

I have only one camera for starters. It is a IPC-HDW5231R-ZE. It will probably be about 3 months to get a second and build slowly from there as I learn more about cameras and BI.

But in the meantime how should I setup my New, Stored, and Alert folders with the above setup in mind?

Any input would be much appreciated. Thank You.

[MikeBwca]

In the BI settings, 'Clips and archiving' tab, change to your dedicated hard drive for BI...
Specify the database path. Basically just change the drive letter in the path.
Do the same for the Folders that have paths.

Please don;t use the main hard drive for BI database & folders. Windows is already hammering it enough. Best to use a dedicated hard drive.

[HeneryH]

If you only have direct connect drives then I see zero value in having separate "New" and "Stored" folders. Just use one and recycle when the drive is full.

Maybe if you have a NAS or something you might want to move off the older stuff but I have never bothered with that.

Alerts are just for the image snaps so that can be very small compared to the video locations.

[oceanslider]

I'm don't know why I would ever need to store anything. I'm sort of thinking to only use the New on my 8tb HDD(and having it deleted after a specific amount of space is used, like 6-7tb), and keep the DB on the 256gb M.2 OS/BI drive?

[HeneryH]

That is exactly how I run my system. I have a separate drive for my video and allocate all of it to New.

[TimG]

As I understand BI5, it will hammer a hard drive if you have multiple high megapixel IP cameras recording to it. With that in mind, I have the "New" folder on a separate 250GB SSD which is relatively cheap and much faster than a mechanical drive, and then a 4TB WD Purple drive for the storage folders. That way, the mechanical storage drive is only used when BI5 does some housekeeping.

Did I ever mention that I'm a Reliability & Safety Engineer

[HeneryH]

You only move a subset of the video to your disks?

I record 24x7 all cameras so moving data to and fro is extra data movement that I don't want or need. It gets stored once then deleted as new video comes in.

[TimG]

Nope, all cameras record 24/7 to the ssd. The 4TB drive then gives me just over a months storage, and Alerts highlight motion as usual.

[HeneryH]

So you are still hammering the hard drive just as much since you are pushing the same number of pixels/sec to it.

You are just doing it in a more bursty method.

Rather than write to the hard drive in a steady x pixels/sec you are now gathering them up in a clip segment on the ssd then bursting it to the drive in chunks.

[TimG]

My thoughts on hammering the hard drive are regarding recording many different camera video feeds all at the same time to a single mechanical hard drive. The recording head cannot physically be in different places at the same time, so something will give. By using a small, cheap and much faster ssd drive for the New folder, it should be able to cope better with the different streams of data. When the ssd drive fails (it will), then I only lose a small percentage of my recordings (albeit the newest). Imagine doing this by recording directly to a 12TB drive

The storage drive will indeed be dealing with the same amount of data, but it will be recorded sequentially from the New folder under the control of BI5, so it won't try to tie the recording heads in knots

If I had had a small capacity hard drive with fast mechanical rotation (7200rpm++), then I could have used that instead of the ssd, but that is what was in the spares box, and it has done a good job for approx 18 months now, and Samsung Magician shows the drive as "Good".