Blue Iris

Problem:
The HDD is working overtime doing something that does NOT show up in disk usage but is resulting in the HDD LED being constantly on and I can hear the box vibrate from the bathroom next door. I'm worried the HDD is going wear out since it's obviously is doing a lot of mechanical work.

Setup:

• Win10, i4770K with 16GB RAM
• BI5 latest as of today
• SSD OS/BI drive
• 14TB WD Purple video drive (causing noise)
• 6x 4K h265 Amcrest PoE cameras running about 3000kB/s total as reported in BI Status
• Continuous direct-to-disk recording on all cams

Failed fixes and investigation:

• Turning off BI stops the thrashing
• Uninstalled AntiVirus in case it was scanning in the background
• Resource Monitor shows close to 0% Disk utilization
• S.M.A.R.T reports no issues with drive
• Pausing each video progressively solves the problem
• Rebooting box fixes it temporarily

Speculation:
The HDD is thrashing trying to write all six cameras to six different BVR files with too little buffer, causing the head to thrash back and forth.

Any ideas on how to fix this? It's seriously vibrating so loud that it worries me.

My fix for this problem is create a "NEW" folder on the SSD drive with as much space as you can spare, then as the NEW folder fills BI can move the whole files to the "STORAGE" folder on the mechanical drive and then delete from there. plus side is that there will be no lag writing to the SSD for 6 cameras and much less writing to the HDD as well. downside is about every 2-3 years you will wear out the SSD and need to replace. My SSD is a 500 Gig and I allocated 350 Gig for BI NEW storage, my HDD is 3.5T and I allocated all but 100 gig for long term storage. I believe in having 30 days to go back as you don't always know something happens right away.

a snip of my settings

acme wrote: ↑Fri Jan 01, 2021 2:03 am I believe in having 30 days to go back as you don't always know something happens right away.

Agree 100%. Sometimes you don't notice for a while that something happened and it's nice to be able to go back and see what occurred. I have 3TB on a NAS to store footage. It varies somewhat but it usually gives me about 30 days of history.

acme wrote: ↑Fri Jan 01, 2021 2:03 am downside is about every 2-3 years you will wear out the SSD and need to replace.

???
MTBF for WD Blue SSD is almost 2 million hours or liker 200 years.

Yeah, SSDs used to have a short life if there was a lot of reading/writing. They're much, much better these days, it's kind of a non-issue.

I'm just about to pick up 4 of the 1TB WD Green Internal drives to upgrade the PCs in the house:

https://www.amazon.com/Green-1TB-Intern ... 07NNRTTCM/

Currently dirt cheap at ~$75 apiece.

HeneryH wrote: ↑Sat Jan 02, 2021 5:23 pm

acme wrote: ↑Fri Jan 01, 2021 2:03 am downside is about every 2-3 years you will wear out the SSD and need to replace.

???
MTBF for WD Blue SSD is almost 2 million hours or liker 200 years.