Z68 ssd caching question

[bestlink101]

I have a survelience system with 16 HIGH quality cameras, The recording goes to the the drives marked f and g, playback isnt that smooth because the hdds are high capacity slow drives (2tb each) can i use z68 to increase the playback speed, because i am aware that you can use ssds to speed up os speed on hdd on z68 mobo
my specs are
I7-2600k
8gb 2133 mhz ram
1 750 gb hdd for os
2 2tb hdd for cameras
amd 6670
gigabyte z68 mobo

 

[RetiredChief]

I dought that a SSD will improve your play back even though a SSD is much faster than a HDD.

A DVD drive, Blue ray drive, and a USB 2 Thumb drive are all slower than a HDD.
A dvd movie plays fine running from a SLOWWWWW DVDdrive. I often play a movie DVD that I store on a USB2 thumb drive - runs fine.

A blue ray (1920 x1080) plays fine from either a Blu-ray player and or from a thumbdrive.

My quess is you have a software or hardware problem.

NOTE: a SINGLE Blue Ray video file for a 1 1/2 hour video can be upto 40 gigs.

I often record TV programs (ie SyFy) on to a DVD disk for later playback. Typical record space for High quality is 2hrs = about 4 Gigs, Goog quality is about 4 hours per 4 gigs. These all playback from a dvd player fine.

 

[nukemaster]

I think your biggest issue is that you are recording 16 streams(would guess 8 per drive) that get fragmented all over the place.

Hard drives do not cope well with this kind of recording(very random writes/reads all over). As long as the recording goes well, playback should be just fine when not still recording.

As said above, BD plays fine even at usb 2.0 speeds(i have done some of this my self), but with BD you are simple reading one file(in a simplified way of seeing it). With your setup i assume you are writing 8 streams to each drive so the head has to jump all over to write the files and read them. This leads to instant fragmentation. This fragmentation happens even under windows MCE(this use of a second drive is good)

On to the point, Intel SSD Cache is more made for accelerating files that are often read from the disk. Since you are constantly writing files, you are not going to get much benefit from it. You can use it as a write through(data will fill a portion of the SSD before being written to the hard drive) cache,but i am not sure how well it will work(it may well reduce the fragmentation since it will be writing is large blocks of data and not 8 different files at a time)

One thing worth trying is to cut down on the number of cameras you are running to do some test. Try with half as many and slowly increase until the issue starts. At that point, you will have found the limits for the drives in use. Your only option at that point is to add more drives so lets say 4-5 streams(cameras) per drive.

Depending on the way your system is setup, a SSD will take all the cameras at once, but will wear much faster(would assume you will be filling it every day). Each night, offloading the files to hard drives for storage(since if you watch it will only be one at a time later and should not have issues).

 

[NITROGEnarcosis]

It is unlikely that adding a caching SSD would help much in this case. It seems your problem is that the hard drives are busy recording the new video and adding the additional load of playback is too much for them. Have you looked into some sort of raid setup for this RAID 10 would seem appropriate.


EDIT: Looks like nukemaster beat me to it!

 

[soccerdocks]

I have a survelience system with 16 HIGH quality cameras, The recording goes to the the drives marked f and g, playback isnt that smooth because the hdds are high capacity slow drives (2tb each) can i use z68 to increase the playback speed, because i am aware that you can use ssds to speed up os speed on hdd on z68 mobo
my specs are
I7-2600k
8gb 2133 mhz ram
1 750 gb hdd for os
2 2tb hdd for cameras
amd 6670
gigabyte z68 mobo

No, it would not improve your playback speed at all. Z68 SSD caching takes the most common information and stores it on the SSD for faster reads. However, since you want to be using it to watch video playback surveillance video the information you would be viewing would be different each time. Thus it wouldn't be on the SSD and would not be loaded any faster.

 

[bestlink101]

I think your biggest issue is that you are recording 16 streams(would guess 8 per drive) that get fragmented all over the place.

Hard drives do not cope well with this kind of recording(very random writes/reads all over). As long as the recording goes well, playback should be just fine when not still recording.

As said above, BD plays fine even at usb 2.0 speeds(i have done some of this my self), but with BD you are simple reading one file(in a simplified way of seeing it). With your setup i assume you are writing 8 streams to each drive so the head has to jump all over to write the files and read them. This leads to instant fragmentation. This fragmentation happens even under windows MCE(this use of a second drive is good)

On to the point, Intel SSD Cache is more made for accelerating files that are often read from the disk. Since you are constantly writing files, you are not going to get much benefit from it. You can use it as a write through(data will fill a portion of the SSD before being written to the hard drive) cache,but i am not sure how well it will work(it may well reduce the fragmentation since it will be writing is large blocks of data and not 8 different files at a time)

One thing worth trying is to cut down on the number of cameras you are running to do some test. Try with half as many and slowly increase until the issue starts. At that point, you will have found the limits for the drives in use. Your only option at that point is to add more drives so lets say 4-5 streams(cameras) per drive.

Depending on the way your system is setup, a SSD will take all the cameras at once, but will wear much faster(would assume you will be filling it every day). Each night, offloading the files to hard drives for storage(since if you watch it will only be one at a time later and should not have issues).

It is because of 16 chanels streams at the same time

 

[nukemaster]

It is because of 16 chanels streams at the same time

Are all 16 going to one drive or 8 to each(2 drives right?). Either way, that is a lot of stress on the drives.

Only guess would be more drives so each drive can keep up better.

 

[bestlink101]

Are all 16 going to one drive or 8 to each(2 drives right?). Either way, that is a lot of stress on the drives.

Only guess would be more drives so each drive can keep up better.

16 channels are going to one hardrive until its full than it goes to the other than it goes back to the first hdd and erases the old data

 

[nukemaster]

Is there any way to tell it(software) to record less cameras for a test(lets say after hours) so you can see at what point it overloads the hard drive. At that point can the software split the cameras over multiple drives? As mentioned above, Raid0(writing 2 or more drives at the same time. This would be invisible to your software) may also help. it will surely overcome any speed limitations, but may not help with fragmentation.

Intel SSD cache only works on one drive at a time too. so you would need 2 ssd's(if it can even be done, never tried with more then one accelerated volume). and as said, no guarantee it would even help(Advanced Mode. Enhanced mode does NOTHING for your use).