Hey all, Been doing quite a bit of reading in the forums here trying to learn as much as I can about Blue Iris and just surveillance setups in general. I've got a friend that is building a new home on a pretty decent sized piece of property, and he has asked his brother and me to try to take on the project of setting up the property with surveillance and networking. This is going to be a big learning experience for both his brother and me. He has a background in networking, I've done my fair share of small networking jobs and building PCs for friends/family. But definitely a first for doing this size of a project. And a first for either of us using BI, so be patient if I'm not a BI Guru .

Main 2 questions I have... Is our hardware going to be capable of doing what we want. And do we go with WD Purple Pros that are running at around, $25-$26 per TB. Or should I go with Skyhawk AIs that I can get for around $23 per TB? The other option that just surfaced is getting Seagate Exos Enterprise drives, currently can get 16TB exos drives for around $19/TB. Also... has anybody had any experience in trying to mix WD Purples, Skyhawk, and/or enterprise drives? I know they have different softwares to make them ideal for surveillance drives, so I question mixing them.

Current planned setup (this may expand in future years and would like the system to be more or less future proofed)

35 4 MP anpviz PoE dome cameras. Most will probably run at 20 FPS with Deepstack AI being used. (have this figured to be ~38 GB/day usage per camera without Deepstack)
4 8 MP Starlight PoE Bullet Cameras. Running at 30 FPS with Deepstack AI. (have this figured to be ~90 GB/day usage per camera without Deepstack)

Server

4u Rosewill Chassis with 12 3.5" trays
Z590 motherboard
Intel i9 10850k CPU (10 core 3.6 Ghz)
32 GB (2x16gb) 3200mhz 16 Latency RAM (Actually have another 32 GB to throw at it to go up to 64 GB if needed)
500 GB m.2 Western Digital SN750 Black (for OS and BI only)
750W Platinum Seasonic PSU
NO Raid Array

Currently for storage we will either be going with WD Purple Pros, or Skyhawk AI drives, or maybe Seagate Exos enterprise drives. Going to start with ~150 TBs of storage and see how fast it fills up and go from there. I've tried calculating how much space is going to be required, and it's really tough to figure out without having some live feeds going and seeing how much is actually being used. If 150 TBs is overkill... that's fine... just means we can store stuff for longer (buddy originally wanted to store video for between 6 months and a year... talked him out of that...)

This is where things get kinda weird. My friend is going to end up having 3 main "zones" of cameras that will have different purposes.

There is a softball field and a baseball field that will be on the property that the "IDEA" is to be able to give parents access to those cameras to watch their kids play their baseball/softball games. Probably will plan on 1 camera per field at this time. There will also a large shop that will be broken into 3 areas (hitting facility for baseball, personal, and storage). Hitting facility will have the 8 MP cameras and once again we will want to allow parents to watch their kids practice through those cameras if they are at home and not able to attend the game or practice. We will call these parents "Group A". There will be 4 cameras in the personal area that we will allow certain people to log in to view. We will call these people "Group B". The rest of the cameras will be around the rest of the shop (inside and outside) and will just be used for general security cameras like the house.

Due to the fact that we are dealing with recording kids... we want to have at least 6 months of video storage on any camera that deals with kids so that we can protect ourselves from any future issues. The cameras around the house only need to store between 2-3 months of footage since they aren't dealing with kids.

So.... a summary of cameras and how long we will be storing footage...

15 4 MP (between 15-20 FPS) cameras around the main house. (2-3 months of footage stored) (no access from Group A or B)
4 8 MP (between 20-30 FPS) cameras in hitting facility. (6 months of footage stored) (Group A needs access)
6 4 MP (between 15-20 FPS) cameras for fields and general surveillance in hitting facility. (6 months of footage stored) (Group A needs access)
6 4 MP (between 15-20 FPS) cameras for personal side of shop. (2-3 months of footage stored) (Group B needs access)
8 4 MP (between 15-20 FPS) cameras for outside of shop and inside storage area. (2-3 months of footage stored) (no access from Group A or B)

Is the system that I have built going to be capable of doing all that we are asking of it? or should I consider building a 2nd identical system to help split the load? I know it would require a second BI license, but one reason we thought about doing 2 systems was just so we could have one system be dedicated to "the kids" and the 2nd one be for personal use.

Sorry about the long post... just really trying to make sure the whole situation was explained. Thanks for any advice and/or help.

We're not ignoring you. I think most of us are home users with a much smaller number of cameras. I simply cannot answer this. Have you contacted support to see if they will respond ?

I have not contacted support no. I did also post this in the IP cam forum and got quite a bit of feedback there.

I'm running 36 cameras at a commercial site. Your computer specs look great. I don't think you need that much memory though. I'm using 8GB. You would be better off running all of those cameras at 15 fps instead of 20-30. You won't notice any difference. I'm not familiar with anpviz cameras. As far as hard drives go, It's more of a personal preference. I've used both and had varying degrees of success. It's a non issue mixing brands. The main thing is to make sure they stay cool and don't jar them at all. Remember to use "direct to disk" recording in the record tab under Video file format and compression. Using D2D will disable BI's overlays so just use any overlays from the cameras themselves. This will lower the cpu usage dramatically. Blue Iris says it will handle up to 64 cameras. I'm not very familiar with Deep Stack so maybe someone else can jump in on that topic. I hope that helps and good luck!

With the latest version of BI5, you can still get overlays on playback of D2D. It records the metadata separately and can regenerate the overlays on the fly during playback.

Frankly, with this change, I see zero reason for ever using anything other than D2D. It should be the setting by default now.

HeneryH wrote: ↑Fri Jan 28, 2022 4:20 pm With the latest version of BI5, you can still get overlays on playback of D2D. It records the metadata separately and can regenerate the overlays on the fly during playback.

Frankly, with this change, I see zero reason for ever using anything other than D2D. It should be the setting by default now.

Good to know. Thanks. Have you noticed any hit on the CPU using BI's overlays? That used to be an issue.

Good to know. Thanks. Have you noticed any hit on the CPU using BI's overlays? That used to be an issue.

Hi, it's not an issue with my home set up. I think the cpu hit was fixed. It is nice to have the camera times all in sync !

Yeah D2D from everything I've read seems to be the way to go anymore. The cost for 32GB of ram was like 100 bucks at the time, so I jumped on it. bought 2 of them because I've got other "workstation" systems to build as well, so the other 32GB will be used somewhere. But was making the comment that if I need to go to 64 GB on this system then I absolutely can.

I've decided I'm going to avoid deepstack for now, and add it later on if I decide I need it. It was suggested to get a dedicated GPU for the system if I use deepstack and I'd rather avoid that for now if I can.

So for now I think I have everything figured out other than the HDDs. I had initially planned on WD Purples... but then I saw some Seagate Exos drives that are such a good deal they're hard to pass up... So given the following prices... which drives would you go with for a 200-300 TB setup?

Seagate Exos X16 16TB Enterprise drives 256 mb cache 7200 RPM
$299.99 or $18.75/TB

WD Purple Pro 18 TB drives 512 MB Cach 7200 RPM
$440.00 or $24.44/TB

Seagate Skyhawk AI 12 TB drives 256 MB Cache 7200 RPM
$280.00 or $23.33/TB

All 3 drives are rated for 550TB/Yr I believe they are all 5 year warranties except the skyhawk AI is only a 3 year I do believe.

These are the cheapest "per TB" Drives I could find above 12 TBs that I would consider putting into a surveillance setup. So between those 3 which one would you be going with? Trying to find a reason not to go with the Exos Drives... but man... those are really well priced....