Drive Detection & Use:
- The Nx Witness Server application, once installed upon a computing device, detects and analyzes available storage during the setup process.
- Nx Witness will utilize all drives in a Server and writes concurrently to all enabled drives, so the more drives you have in a Server the less throughput you'll see on any individual drive.
- Nx Witness will not allow recording to drives that are less than 10% of the largest of all other drives in the system (e.g. an SD Card or USB Flash drive). For example, if a user has 10 TB NAS registered at some server all other drives with total space less than 1 TB will be disabled for recording at this particular server. This is done to ensure a correct write-ratio calculation and to improve overall system stability.
- External storage drives can also be assigned via the Nx Witness client. Storage options include local storage to the HDDs available on the server computer, Direct-Attached Storage (DAS), and Network-Attached Storage (NAS).
General Nx Witness Write-to-Archive Process:
- IP Video camera streams are detected and captured by the Nx Witness Media Server and stored in RAM.
- The Nx Witness Server writes captured IP video in RAM to available storage (internal hard drives, DAS, or NAS) once per minute..
- All suitable drives are written concurrently and according to a ratio the system calculates for their size. So, for example, if a single server has multiple sized hard drives Nx Witness will fill up each hard drive at the same rate to ensure that no single drive's system bus gets overloaded.
- Nx Witness keeps some free space at every drive so that performance is not affected. You can find more details by reading our article about adjusting reserved disk space.
- When a drive is full Nx Witness will then begin to overwrite non-locked video starting with the earliest (oldest) video on the server across all drives. Thus a solid timeline is guaranteed.
- Since 2.6 version Nx Witness prevents recording onto the system drive if there's any other storage drive installed on the server which meets the minimum requirements and is at least 5 times larger than system disk.
- User can not manually modify the archive (delete/add/etc.) using Nx Software
How is hard disk failure managed?
If a single drive in a multiple drive system fails the Nx Witness system will do the following:
- continue writing to all available drives
- create a notification in the notifications panel that a hard drive failure has occurred
- rebuild the archive index after the Media Server is restarted
- If Failover-on-Hard-Drive-Failure is enabled the cameras writing to this drive will be moved to a designated Failover server (starting in v4.0).
Comments
3 comments
How many days is data recorded and stored on server by default?
Hello Sir
I am new with nx-witness. Can we store any video along with video information coming from different source (not camera) into the NX-witness server? If it is possible please let us know the way and API ?
What is the difference of Nx-Witness and NX-Meta if we considering above requirement which option is suitable?
Please elaborate and thanks in advance.
Best Regards
John h
Gentlemen,
Our apologies for the late reply. We are working on improving our process to reply faster to questions under the support articles.
Mr. Duong The number of days depending on the storage in the server you use. You can estimate the required storage by using our Nx System calculator. The calculator will never be 100% precise due to the technology behind modern compression techniques like H.264 and H.265. So after a certain period of recording footage you can check the Server Setting menu, tab Storage Analytics for real world data based on your specific situation and you can adjust the storage by adding or removing disks to your system to meet the required storage retention period. The good news is that the System Calculator in general overestimates the required storage.
Hi John h,
From version 4.0 onwards we offer the option of adding a Virtual Camera. I assume in this way you can achieve what you ask for. You can check THIS support article for more information regarding Virtual Cameras.
Regarding the difference between Nx Witness VMS and Nx Meta VMP. The VMS is suitable for production environments and the Meta VMP is a platform solely for developers to have access to the latest and greatest features and documentation to create their custom integrations, often AI-based integrations. You can't buy any licences for Meta VMP so you can't use it in a production environment.
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