Harddrive size advise

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blue-eye-boy

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Hey all, I need advise please on what the best size/sizes of harddrive/s are the best to buy. Here's my scenario.

We need much extra space for our cctv cameras at work. At present we can hold recorded data for up to 9 days, which is not good enough. We will also be expanding the amount of cameras during the next year, so more cameras will also shorten the recorded storage. Now I have approx 1.5 tb space for the video, and want to expand the space at least 3 to 4 tb. Now for sensitive data I know it is best to get smaller drives, so not that much data is lost if one crashes, but here, if we loose a month's video every 2 or 3 years, it wont hurt. I need your input on what would be most cost effective, 1 big, of a few smaller ones?

Thanks in advance..
 
It all depends on your budget. You can have anything from some external hard drives or a NAS device up to a SAN that will bankrupt some Saudi princes.

Ballpark of your budget?
 
Garyvdh said:
Best price point at the moment is still the 2Tb internals.
Click to expand...

I saw on the Esquire specials for this week that the 2Tb externals were actually cheaper than the internals.
 
Build a little NAS.

1 x HP N54L Microserver R1399 ex Vat
4 x 3TB Seagate drives @ R1299 ex vat

That comes to around R7500 incl. Chuck FreeNAS on there and build a RaidZ2 array which will give you around 5.5TB of storage with redundancy (2 drives can fail). You can also enable compression which may give you a little extra space, but with video I doubt you'll get much more out.
 
Crowley said:
It all depends on your budget. You can have anything from some external hard drives or a NAS device up to a SAN that will bankrupt some Saudi princes.

Ballpark of your budget?
Click to expand...
I cant push it too much, but I guess R 4000 to R5000.
 
DrJohnZoidberg said:
Build a little NAS.

1 x HP N54L Microserver R1399 ex Vat
4 x 3TB Seagate drives @ R1299 ex vat

That comes to around R7500 incl. Chuck FreeNAS on there and build a RaidZ2 array which will give you around 5.5TB of storage with redundancy (2 drives can fail). You can also enable compression which may give you a little extra space, but with video I doubt you'll get much more out.
Click to expand...

Thing is I dont have any knowledge of this, and I like to know what I'm doing.
 
Firstly...more info my friend. What kind of pc is that 1.5 in at the moment? Give specs.

Can the software deal with multiple partitions? i.e. Write to C drive the first 2 days and then to D drive?

For critical info. No small drives is a crap plan. Rather make a proper backup plan. i.e. keeping the data in two separate physical locations. Treat the two as entirely separate issues. Mass storage vs storing mission critical info. For mission critical I find a combination of hard-disk + external drive + cloud backup works best, but its pretty much personal preference at this point. Nobody can agree on whats "right".

Gary is right...2TB internal drive is where its at price/gig at the moment. Maybe 3TB depending on what you can get. Definitely not lower or higher than 2/3. For your case I think you might be able to get away with 5400rpm drives which will help with price. Taking a wild guess I'd say WD green drives maybe.

Zoid's plan is technically elegant. Though cost and the RAID might be an issue. N54L introduces extra costs that you *might* be able to work around here. RAID involves possible technical complexities. I personally don't think a RAID + NAS solution is appropriate here. Its overkill for keeping video for a couple of days.

Personally I'm not a big fan of the N54Ls unless you get them at a wicked discount. Last time someone's mobo here fried the advice was "might as well buy a new N54L...same price as replacement mobo". Don't get me wrong - they're not bad at all. Just over-hyped imo.

Depending on existing hardware (PSU & mobo in particular) you might be able to get away with just sticking more 2TB drives into it. NB this has zero recovery / backup built in.
 
jacqvt said:
Hey all, I need advise please on what the best size/sizes of harddrive/s are the best to buy. Here's my scenario.

We need much extra space for our cctv cameras at work. At present we can hold recorded data for up to 9 days, which is not good enough. We will also be expanding the amount of cameras during the next year, so more cameras will also shorten the recorded storage. Now I have approx 1.5 tb space for the video, and want to expand the space at least 3 to 4 tb. Now for sensitive data I know it is best to get smaller drives, so not that much data is lost if one crashes, but here, if we loose a month's video every 2 or 3 years, it wont hurt. I need your input on what would be most cost effective, 1 big, of a few smaller ones?

Thanks in advance..
Click to expand...

HP Proliant Microserver (+-R1500). 4x 4TB drives (+-R8000).

Install Linux on Microserver and use ZFS as a file system. Have RaidZ1 setup (so you can lose 1 drive out of 4 in your array without data loss, RaidZ2 - 2 drives - if you're really worried.)

Total cost: +-R10 000 (thats erring on the high side).

Also perhaps something like ZoneMinder if you don't have a proper DVR system. It's free!

http://www.zoneminder.com/
 
Last edited:
DrJohnZoidberg said:
Build a little NAS.

1 x HP N54L Microserver R1399 ex Vat
4 x 3TB Seagate drives @ R1299 ex vat

That comes to around R7500 incl. Chuck FreeNAS on there and build a RaidZ2 array which will give you around 5.5TB of storage with redundancy (2 drives can fail). You can also enable compression which may give you a little extra space, but with video I doubt you'll get much more out.
Click to expand...

Great minds think alike! Although I would have run Debian or Ubuntu for the host OS. FreeNas or Nas4Free may be easier for a non technical person! I just found ZFS on BSD to be a lot slower than ZFS on Linux...
 
jsheed_sa said:
Great minds think alike! Although I would have run Debian or Ubuntu for the host OS. FreeNas or Nas4Free may be easier for a non technical person! I just found ZFS on BSD to be a lot slower than ZFS on Linux...
Click to expand...

That's strange because ZFS is native BSD.
 
DrJohnZoidberg said:
That's strange because ZFS is native BSD.
Click to expand...

Yep I thought so.

I *may* still have the pastebin logs somewhere of what the difference was, but it was like 30% or so faster on Linux...

This was BSD 9 though, maybe 9.1 is better...

Anyhow i'm more comfortable on a Linux box, so I prefer it over BSD - the fact it tested faster was just a bonus ;)

Well it tested faster on Linux vs Nas4Free and FreeNas - but possibly the version of FreeBSD they were using was customized and a tad crappier than stock?
 
jsheed_sa said:
Yep I thought so.

I *may* still have the pastebin logs somewhere of what the difference was, but it was like 30% or so faster on Linux...

This was BSD 9 though, maybe 9.1 is better...

Anyhow i'm more comfortable on a Linux box, so I prefer it over BSD - the fact it tested faster was just a bonus ;)

Well it tested faster on Linux vs Nas4Free and FreeNas - but possibly the version of FreeBSD they were using was customized and a tad crappier than stock?
Click to expand...

That would be interesting if you could find that. I have recently set up a FreeNAS box with 4 drives and performance is a bit disappointing. I don't need it to be super fast but I was expecting a bit more.
 
DrJohnZoidberg said:
That would be interesting if you could find that. I have recently set up a FreeNAS box with 4 drives and performance is a bit disappointing. I don't need it to be super fast but I was expecting a bit more.
Click to expand...

Try ZFS on Linux in Ubuntu or use dpkg to install manually from their website.

For Ubuntu:

apt-get install python-software-properties
apt-add-repository ppa:zfs-native/stable
apt-get update
apt-get install ubuntu-zfs
 
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