Question Interfacing storage drive with small computer ?

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medic5678

medic5678

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Jun 26, 2022
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Ok, I picked up one of these at Amazon.


Wonderful little box. Running security software I need stored on a big drive (12 TB WaterPanther drive.) Obviously,, I cannot put the 12 tb drive in the mini pc. How can I connect these two, and power up the Water Panther drive as well?
Thanks to all who reply :).

EDIT:

The software calls for a 7200 rpm drive. I'll be recording the cameras directly to storage.
 
Likely you will need an independently powered USB hub and then a USB to SATA adapter to connect the drive to the USB hub.

This HDD?

https://waterpanther.com/products/12tb-7200rpm-sata-6g-lff-hdd-das-refurb?variant=34656677363845

Take a look at the applicable installation Guide/Manual.

Pay attention to the HDD's power requirements and connectivity options.

So as I understand the requirements:

AceMagic Micro PC [USB Port] < --- USB cable ---> [USB Port] USB Hub with external power[USB port] <---USB cable--- [USB/SATA adapter] ---SATA cable ---> [12 TB Walter Panther Drive].

Also not sure about the cameras (make,model) likely USB (?) so the cameras could draw power from the USB hub as well.

I would leery of taping the cameras to the HDD. Moving the cameras would mean moving the HDDs which may not end well if not careful.

Anyway just some initial ideas and thoughts. There may be other ideas and suggestions. And questions...
 
I'm not actually taping, the cameras are IP cams, and I'm recording the video streams to a hard drive, in the event a problem arises and we need to look through the footage.

Basically, that's the date flow, from USB port to Water Panther drive. Not sure if USB 3.0 is fast enough.
 
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Ah.... taping = recording. Apologies. Sometimes the words just get in the way. And we have seen a number of interesting/unusual hardware projects..... :)

= = = =

"The software calls for a 7200 rpm drive."

What software? Not sure about that specific requirement for a 7200 HDD.

The process will only be as fast as the slowest component in the path. Likely the HDD.

However, the IP cams (specs?) could be the choke point. Are they USB connected to Micro PC?

So the streaming/taping software would run on the Micro PC and the video data stream from the IP cams would be saved (recorded) to the SSD via USB connection.

Generally the way home security systems would be setup. Just portable - correct?

Doable project - just need to work out the hardware and performance requirements.

The HDD drive itself likely to be the limiting component. USB 3.0 or higher.....
 
Wondering if
Ralston18 said:
Ah.... taping = recording. Apologies. Sometimes the words just get in the way. And we have seen a number of interesting/unusual hardware projects..... :)

= = = =

"The software calls for a 7200 rpm drive."

What software? Not sure about that specific requirement for a 7200 HDD.

The process will only be as fast as the slowest component in the path. Likely the HDD.

However, the IP cams (specs?) could be the choke point. Are they USB connected to Micro PC?

So the streaming/taping software would run on the Micro PC and the video data stream from the IP cams would be saved (recorded) to the SSD via USB connection.

Generally the way home security systems would be setup. Just portable - correct?

Doable project - just need to work out the hardware and performance requirements.

The HDD drive itself likely to be the limiting component. USB 3.0 or higher.....
Click to expand...
The cameras are all connected to a router, whether with an ethernet cable or wireless connection. My computer is also connected to the network, and Blue Iris allows you to set up many cameras. You can pick the disk it will store to. The requirement of Blue Iris is a 7200 rpm drive. Wondering if the bottleneck would be the 3.0 usb. I could also by a NAS, install the drive and just connect it via ethernet and assign a drive name to it and use it as a network drive. Leaning toward that.
 
"The requirement of Blue Iris is a 7200 rpm drive."

Perhaps "minimal" requirement? [My underline.]

This software?

https://reolink.com/blog/blue-iris-ip-security-cameras/

I would contact Blue Iris about the requirement/need for what is almost an obsolete product. That being a 7200 rpm hard drive. Blue Iris needs to explain that. My sense is that they may have simply not bothered to update the requirements as of old.

Overall, again, I would expect that a faster USB SSD would be to the benefit of your requirements.

Via a NAS or a shared network drive on some other host.

Your plan is overall what I would expect - excluding the 7200 rpm HDD. That part still does not fit.
 
The 7200 is a minimum standard that works perfectly. It's ok because you can get some incredible huge 7200 rpm drives very cheap. I will end up with about 24 to 30 TB total. You don't need that much performance. You need reliability. These are proven in security camera applications.
 
I've got several friends using recertified Water Panthers. They're good drives, I'm saving money. SSD prices are dropping, it's just that I've already had these drives for a year and I'm planning on ultimately running them mirrored as network drives. All my computers have ssd's, by the way. So for a network drive, I wouldn't taking that much of a hit on performance. On the cameras, drive performance isn't much of an issue. You won't even need anything unless something happens. It just takes a lot of space to store a few weeks of recordings. I bought a little drive enclosure that's powered with USB. I'm just going to try it and see if it's adequate for now. This is a time where I'm working on building up my system and getting all the cameras in place. Will have about 30 cameras around my property, running 15 now.
 
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Reference:

"I bought a little drive enclosure that's powered with USB"

Make and model enclosure?

Two things to keep in mind; 1) the drives will need to be kept cooled in that "little enclosure" and 2) USB power via a computer hosting the enclosure may not be enough power.

Fair enought to try it all out but start thinking about recovery options beforehand. I.e., one of the drives or the enclosure itself fails with all those weeks of recording.

And Murphy's law likely to kick in when "something happens" and you need those recordings.
 
USAFRet said:
That will almost certainly not work with a 3.5" HDD.

An HDD needs both 5v and 12v.
The USB can only supply the 5v.

An enclosure for a 3.5" HDD needs wall power, not just USB.
Click to expand...
It's a separately powered enclosure. https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0C5J28LYH/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_asin_title_o02_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1


I am not running anything that draws much off my box itself. I've got a powered usb expansion hub for that.. I'm monitoring it enough that should anything fail, I'll know it in a timely enough way. I have a LOT of redundancy in my system. Critical cameras are stored in 4 places with 24/7 taping. I even have solar backup cameras. Not the greatest individually, but anyone that comes out here gets filmed by a couple of them even if there's no power. Also got a couple of license plate readers. Drive by my house, I've got your plate.

Ultimately, will probably go with a raid 5 as prices drop. We're also working on a lot of animation/video and music production and I'd like to have a lot of storage. This is a fun little experiment in the meantime.

Also installing photobeam sensors around the perimeter of my property. The sensor is broken, AI will examine camera to see if it's a person or an animal, with appropriate response.

These little computers run Blue Iris amazingly well. I want to have everything all in one place and I'll be using this to do it.
 
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They probably specify 7200rpm instead of 5900 or 5400rpm to keep the latency down. 10000 or 15000rpm server drives have even lower latency.

Check the spec of your drives to see if they prioritize disk writes. WD creates the Purple range and Seagate the Skyhawk range, specifically for video recorders, where dropped frames during recording from multiple cameras is undesirable.

A typical scenario might include 16 cameras recorded in real time on to one hard disk.
 
Misgar said:
They probably specify 7200rpm instead of 5900 or 5400rpm to keep the latency down. 10000 or 15000rpm server drives have even lower latency.

Check the spec of your drives to see if they prioritize disk writes. WD creates the Purple range and Seagate the Skyhawk range, specifically for video recorders, where dropped frames during recording from multiple cameras is undesirable.

A typical scenario might include 16 cameras recorded in real time on to one hard disk.
Click to expand...
We'll just have to see how it all goes. Can I run 30 cameras? You can do a lot more cameras if you're just writing to hard drive instead of displaying them in the program. I'll know in a few days :). I'm still going to need to go with an NAS system with multiple drives in a raid at some point. I want to wait for drive prices to drop if I can.

I like this one:
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0C5J28LYH/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_asin_title_o02_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1

You're got to match it with NAS DRIVES. The Water Panther Arensals are DAS drives. So you're talking about a chunk of change, about $1k for the setup with 4 12tb drives. Since I've already got 2 of the 12 TB Water Panthers, I could just mirror them across the network and get a second $22 case. I've just got to try it and see what happens.
 
USB 3.0 SuperSpeed on a Type-A connector has a transfer rate of 5Gbit/s, which according to Wikipedia equates to 500Mbyte/s. If you move over to USB-C, transfer rates start at 5Gbit/s and increase to 10Gbit/s or 20Gbit/s on some motherboards.

Even my fastest hard disks (8TB Western Digital Purple) only run at 250MB/s on the outer edge of the platters, dropping to 125MB/s on the innermost tracks.

Hence, you are not going to saturate the USB3 bus with a single hard disk in a USB3.0 enclosure.

When transferring data from a 2TB Crucial X6 portable SSD via USB3.0 Type-A to an M.2 NVMe in a PC, I see transfer speeds starting around 350MB/s, until the SLC buffer in the M.2 drive fills up and the transfer rate plummets. The initial speed is limited by the X6. A modern Crucial X9 Pro drive with a transfer rate of 1050MB/s would saturate a USB3.0 Type A port.

TLDR. Don't worry. USB 3.0 is fast enough to run a hard disk in an external enclosure.

Can I run 30 cameras? It all depends on camera resolution and the codec used to encode the video streams.

Try this bitrate calculator and see if it matches your hard disk's slowest transfer rate (with heads over the innermost tracks). This is normally half the maximum quoted transfer rate for the drive.

https://www.getscw.com/bitrate-calculator.php

It shows 19Mb/s for thirty cameras at 720p, 65Mb/s for 30 x 1080p and 128Mb/s with 30 x 4K video and H265 encoding. Remember, these camera data rates appear to be quoted in bits per second and hard disks are usually specified in bytes per second (8 bits equals 1 byte).

You need to check your cameras' data rates. They may differ considerably from the figures used in this calculator, depending on the compression algorithm used by the codec. H265 compresses slightly harder than the older H264 codec.

When considering RAID, remember RAID0 (striping) is the least "safe" option. If any drive fails in the array, all your data vanishes. RAID0 gives you speed, but not security. One 73GB SCSI drive on my Adaptec RAID card failed in a 4 disk RAID0 array and my test PC stopped booting.

RAID1 (mirroring) is all well and good, but I had errors creep in on two 1TB mirrored drives many years ago and different files went bad on each drive. Backups are essential with any form of RAID if the data is important.

Nowadays I use RAID-Z2 (similar to RAID6) in TrueNas CORE on four different machines with arrays of 6 and 8 drives. In theory (but not in real life) using Z2 means I can lose 2 drives out of each array and still keep all my data intact.

Unfortunately, writing all that parity data in Z2 to two extra drives, means the total speed of the array is not as fast as you might expect. The whole 6 or 8 drive array is not much faster than a single hard disk drive.

TLDR. Consider very carefully if any form of RAID is a good idea before proceeding.
 
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Real world security camera bitrate.

From 1 of my Reolink RLC-423 cameras
OhdEiR9.png
 
Misgar said:
USB 3.0 SuperSpeed on a Type-A connector has a transfer rate of 5Gbit/s, which according to Wikipedia equates to 500Mbyte/s. If you move over to USB-C, transfer rates start at 5Gbit/s and increase to 10Gbit/s or 20Gbit/s on some motherboards.

Even my fastest hard disks (8TB Western Digital Purple) only run at 250MB/s on the outer edge of the platters, dropping to 125MB/s on the innermost tracks.

Hence, you are not going to saturate the USB3 bus with a single hard disk in a USB3.0 enclosure.

When transferring data from a 2TB Crucial X6 portable SSD via USB3.0 Type-A to an M.2 NVMe in a PC, I see transfer speeds starting around 350MB/s, until the SLC buffer in the M.2 drive fills up and the transfer rate plummets. The initial speed is limited by the X6. A modern Crucial X9 Pro drive with a transfer rate of 1050MB/s would saturate a USB3.0 Type A port.

TLDR. Don't worry. USB 3.0 is fast enough to run a hard disk in an external enclosure.

Can I run 30 cameras? It all depends on camera resolution and the codec used to encode the video streams.

Try this bitrate calculator and see if it matches your hard disk's slowest transfer rate (with heads over the innermost tracks). This is normally half the maximum quoted transfer rate for the drive.

https://www.getscw.com/bitrate-calculator.php

It shows 19Mb/s for thirty cameras at 720p, 65Mb/s for 30 x 1080p and 128Mb/s with 30 x 4K video and H265 encoding. Remember, these camera data rates appear to be quoted in bits per second and hard disks are usually specified in bytes per second (8 bits equals 1 byte).

You need to check your cameras' data rates. They may differ considerably from the figures used in this calculator, depending on the compression algorithm used by the codec. H265 compresses slightly harder than the older H264 codec.

When considering RAID, remember RAID0 (striping) is the least "safe" option. If any drive fails in the array, all your data vanishes. RAID0 gives you speed, but not security. One 73GB SCSI drive on my Adaptec RAID card failed in a 4 disk RAID0 array and my test PC stopped booting.

RAID1 (mirroring) is all well and good, but I had errors creep in on two 1TB mirrored drives many years ago and different files went bad on each drive. Backups are essential with any form of RAID if the data is important.

Nowadays I use RAID-Z2 (similar to RAID6) in TrueNas CORE on four different machines with arrays of 6 and 8 drives. In theory (but not in real life) using Z2 means I can lose 2 drives out of each array and still keep all my data intact.

Unfortunately, writing all that parity data in Z2 to two extra drives, means the total speed of the array is not as fast as you might expect. The whole 6 or 8 drive array is not much faster than a single hard disk drive.

TLDR. Consider very carefully if any form of RAID is a good idea before proceeding.
Click to expand...
Thank you for sharing your knowledge here. You answered my original question. Lots of good info to parse through. I think the best approach is going to just be blundering forward and seeing how well it works. Aside from recording via Blue Iris, I also have dedicated NVR's for most of these cameras. All cameras also have SD cards. I've got a lot to play around with. I do also have multiple copies of Blue Iris, so I can split up the camera recording duties among my pc's.

Ultimately, I want to interface the perimeter sensors with the Blue Iris software to determine if anything crossing my property line is human or deer. Just a few seconds of warning can make all the difference with a home invasion.

Let's assume I've got 30 cameras recording at 1080p. That's 65 mb per second. Divide by 8 and about 8 megabytes per second. That equals 64 mb per minute = 92 gb per day. Assuming 12 TB drives, that theoretically means about 133 days of recording space.? Not at all sure of my calculation here :).

What about mirroring two drives connected to 2 pc's via usb across the network? Is that an iffy propostion?
 
medic5678 said:
Ultimately, I want to interface the perimeter sensors with the Blue Iris software to determine if anything crossing my property line is human or deer. Just a few seconds of warning can make all the difference with a home invasion.
Click to expand...
30 cameras....

How large is the area you're trying to cover?
How far away are the cameras, and how are they connected to the PC(s)?
 
I'm glad I live in a country where home invasions are very rare indeed. The only animals I've seen on my property are foxes, despite there being a forest over the main road with a rather shy deer population.

Telling the difference between animals and invaders reminds me of when I was working with GRiD laptops, as used in the film Aliens to control automatic sentry guns in the corridor of the abandoned colony.

Modern security software can analyze images in real time and separate out humans from animals. Commercial recognition systems might not be cheap, but it's an avenue worth exploring to see if any home owners have written their own code. You'd probably need a powerful GPU with loads of CUDA cores to run OpenGL/CL instructions on 30 simultaneous video feeds.

maxresdefault.jpg


AliensSentryGunBTS.jpg


Getting back to your most recent question, it should be possible to direct camera feeds via Ethernet to two different PCs, each of which has its external USB hard disk. You could set up a shared folder on the "slave" PC and direct the "master" PC to send backup data to the second drive. No doubt there are better solutions, but keep on experimenting.

Remember, with video surveillance systems, you can save on storage space by cutting back on the number of frames per second recorded. Instead of 30fps, you could record every fifth frame, ending up with only 6fps. That would extend your recording time per disk by 5x. On critical feeds, you could stick to 30fps or 15fps.
 
Misgar said:
Remember, with video surveillance systems, you can save on storage space by cutting back on the number of frames per second recorded. Instead of 30fps, you could record every fifth frame, ending up with only 6fps. That would extend your recording time per disk by 5x. On critical feeds, you could stick to 30fps or 15fps.
Click to expand...
On my Reolinks, with the above settings, each camera consumes about 2TB for a rolling 45 days of 24/7 recording.

700MB per 15 minute file during the day (full color)
280MB at night, on IR.
 
I've got a lot of tweaking to do. Waiting on Amazon packages to arrive :). With my LPR cameral, all I need to do is get a license plate number. If I can do that on less frames, it wouldn't matter. I could put the LPR on twice. Once to record 24/7 at a low rate, another to record at 30 fps if there's any activity. In other words, I've got a lot of tweaking to do :).
 
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