Blue Iris 5 Multi Drive Storage Setup

[quickstop]

I am no expert and since you are not receiving replies, I thought I would offer an opinion. Since BI uses the New and Stored folders, you can configure files to move from New folder to Stored folder on any disk you choose. Then there is software to automatically manage your files so you can copy, move, backup from the Stored folder to any disk(s) available to your server including NAS, DAS, or local disks. That is my plan, and if you come up with a better solution, please let me know.

[TimG]

Daisy chaining just means that you keep moving the same files around from drive to drive which can't be a good idea, and it will cause increased wear to all drives.

Has anybody tried software to convert multiple drives into one large pool ? Or is that just called a NAS

[ctfjr]

I did this: https://www.tomshardware.com/news/how-t ... 36783.html
in one of my computers. I should add that I have 2 NAS' running here where everything is backed up to.

[TimG]

Thanks for that ctfjr, looks like it is easy to do with Storage Spaces in Win10, but the OP doesn't mention which OS is being used.

Keeping on the Win10 theme, I also found https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/hel ... age-spaces

So, my conclusion is that RAID usually requires identical hard drives, but a "Simple" Storage Space POOL can be made of hard drives of differing capacities. It may not give you RAID data protection, but it will give you a very big Storage drive that can be added to. Hmm

[jefft]

Interesting; please do post back if you get anything from BI support (not that it's very likely in my experience of them!).

I like to be able to assign a camera to a disk/folder, to spread the work across spindles based on how the cameras are used. I used to use ACTi's NVR and could do that easily. I thought that BI was dumb and put everything into the one folder, but having looked more closely at the config, I think that we can use multiple drives in a smarter way (caveat: my system is awaiting its second drive later in the week; I'll test this once it arrives!):

- Format both drives as standard JBODs, each with its own drive letter
- Create some folders on each drive - for me, this would be 'CamGroup1' and 'CamGroup2' for example; could even be a folder per camera (which is what ACTi NVR does)
- Add those folders into BI's folder list in the system config / 'Clips and Archiving' tab
- Edit individual camera configs in the 'Record' tab to record clips to the appropriate folder

That should, if BI does what seems logical, cause cameras to write to a particular folder - you could have one per camera, or group them.

I'll report back when I've tried it...

[TimG]

Interesting; please do post back if you get anything from BI support (not that it's very likely in my experience of them!).

That's odd, I usually get a reply within 24 hours.

[MikeBwca]

...
Keeping on the Win10 theme, I also found https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/hel ... age-spaces
...

Storage Spaces! I had no idea! Thanks. That answers my issue about raid. I can't use a RAID card in my older desktop - no slot for it.

I'll test it out first with my 2tb WD Purple, and my 2tb Seagate Skyhawk. Then get 1 or 2 more 2tb SSD's.

[MikeBwca]

I just discovered in 'Disk Management', the options 'New Spanned Volume' and 'New Striped Volume'.

Defined 1 striped 4tb volume with 2 2tb hhd's Copied several gig of data to it. Works awesome.

[MikeBwca]

I just discovered in 'Disk Management', the options 'New Spanned Volume' and 'New Striped Volume'.

Defined 1 striped 4tb volume with 2 2tb hhd's Copied several gig of data to it. Works awesome.

[MikeBwca]

Well, works, but TRIM is not supported for SSD's.