Improving storage speed
Answered
I have a Windows server with twelve hard drive bays. 2 bays are taken up by mirrored SSDs running the OS/VMS and 5 bays have WD Purple 10 TB drives, set to Raid 5. I've currently got 35 cameras running on it at 1080. I was really hoping this server would be able to handle 128 cameras, but I'm already getting hard drive speed errors at peak times.
I can add five more drives to the server, but I'm not sure of the best plan. Should I do another five 10 TB at Raid 5, or maybe just give each one it's own drive letter? I was hoping for some sort of Raid, so I can a recovery option on a failed drive. But if it's going to kill performance, we may have to find a plan b.
Thanks for any advice!
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Hi Johnathan Powell,
If the 5 bays represent one drive letter / mount point, Nx will see this as one drive and the load balancing over multiple drives won't work. So adding a drive letter might resolve the issue you encounter, since 5 drives, in general, should be more than sufficient to handle 35 devices.
More information about how we manage storage can be read in THIS support article.
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Norman, thank you for your response. I'm still not sure I get the best way to do this. Here are options I can think of:
1. Add another bank of 5 drives, also in raid 6, so two drive letters on the server. This was planned for future growth anyways. It should effectively double hard drive speed, I think. Being that I want to load 128 cameras on this system though, that won't be enough.
2. Change it to 3 banks of 3 drives, each bank having its own drive letter. This would be the fastest I could go and still have some redundancy. It still may have speed issues with 128 cameras though.
3. Forget about Raid redundancy and just install 10 10TB drives, each with its own letter. It should allow for the fastest write speed and most storage. But I'd have no redundancy when a drive fails. That makes me a little nervous.
I'm trying to get this right now, as I have three of these servers. I'm about to have 120 cameras installed over the next few months, with 100 more coming next year. These first 35 cameras were just to start stress testing things, and so far it isn't passing.
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Hi Johnathan Powell,
When using one drive letter, Nx considers it as one drive and all data goes to a single drive, while if Nx detects multiple drives it will spread the load over multiple drives.
Of course, it all depends on bandwidth and drive resources, but 128 HD cameras recording to 5 disks should not be a problem. You can use the storage analytics as a reference for the bandwidth used by the cameras over the past period of time, to see if the drive resources can handle the bandwidth usage.
What I would do is using an equal number of drives of equal size and use half the number of drives for main storage and half the number of drives for real-time backup.
So in your case I would add 1 more drive and allocate 3 drives for main storage and 3 drives for real-time back-upstorage.
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