24/7 Computer. Suggestions?

BoomAM · 6 Mar 2007 at 15:13

Hi.
We're heavily considering setting up a Network camera setup on our network, involving around 10 or so cameras. We already have two, some Axis 210A's, the rest of the cameras will be the same ones.
The software that comes with them allows us to record based on motion sensativity to any drive thats viewable from the computer with the software.
The spec ive come up with thus far is:

Intel C2D E6400 -- £146.86.
Asus P5N-E SLI nForce650 -- £82.24.
GeIL 2Gb DDR2 PC5300 2x1 -- £105.74.
Asus 7300GS -- £46.99.
Samsung 80Gb SATA300 -- £30.54 (For the OS/Apps).
Samsung 500Gb SATA300 -- £90.46 (Storage).
Samsung 500Gb SATA300 -- £90.46 (Storage).
Samsung 500Gb SATA300 -- £90.46 (Storage).
Lite-On 16x DVDRW DL -- £17.61.
Antec TruePower Trio 650W -- £76.36.
Antec NSK6500 Case -- £69.31
Samsung SM-205BW 20" WS TFT -- £199.74
2xZalman ZM-F2 92mm Fans -- £6.46 each, £12.92.
Belkin Cat5e 3m -- £2.29.

Total of £1001.48.

Some of the choice may seem a little odd/extreme, but we're looking at future expansion of the system.
Ive used this reasoning for these specific parts:
E6400 - Dual core, helps with encoding, and general system performance.
2Gb ram - It'll be doing encoding and handling a lot of video streams.
NF650 SLI board - The extra PCI-Ex16 slot can be used in future for SATA cards. And the processor supports allows us to drop in a quad core/more memory easyily.
1.5Tb of storage - 10 Cameras. 640x480. 30fps. Nuff said really.

650W PSU - To power everything now, and anything added.
Case - Plenty of cooling for everything while not too obstrusive.
20" TFT - So we can see everything properly.

92mm fans - To max out the cooling potential of the case.

Any suggestions/changes?
The system will literally be run 24/7/365 worst case. And best case, just the working days of the week, and half terms/year ends off.

Thanks in advance all.

Cupra · 6 Mar 2007 at 15:56

if i was going to do a system like that id get 4 of the same drives and raid 0+1 them so its quick and has a back up. u would still have a terabyte hard drive and u would never loose your data.
Peice of mind for 60 quid is well worth it

if you want 1.5 terabytes just get 4 750gb's

melbourne720 · 6 Mar 2007 at 15:58

Will you RAID the drives to allow for the fastest data transfer?
What about backup of those storage drives?
Video manipulation - might be advisable to go for a e6600. Bigger cache.
Faster RAM - 6400 at least, plus it will help if you OC that CPU.

Otherwise looks good - Big BoomAM is watching you :eek:

BoomAM · 6 Mar 2007 at 16:19

paul_64l said:
if i was going to do a system like that id get 4 of the same drives and raid 0+1 them so its quick and has a back up. u would still have a terabyte hard drive and u would never loose your data.
Peice of mind for 60 quid is well worth it

if you want 1.5 terabytes just get 4 750gb's

The 750Gb drives are v.expensive compared to a 500Gb drive.
For the same price as a 750Gb, i could get 2x500Gbs.

melbourne720 said:
Will you RAID the drives to allow for the fastest data transfer?
What about backup of those storage drives?
Video manipulation - might be advisable to go for a e6600. Bigger cache.
Faster RAM - 6400 at least, plus it will help if you OC that CPU.

Otherwise looks good - Big BoomAM is watching you

I was considering the option of stripping the three 500Gb drives. But in all fairness, the standard setup should be fast enough. So i might just set the software to record to one drive, when thats full, the next, and so on.
No video manipulation will be done. Its simply an encoding/viewing jobbo.

No OCing will be done. Again, this is a system thats going to be on almost all the time. OCing will not help.
This is not a games system. This is simply a system to act as a video server to some network cameras. So things like OCing and faster memory will do little to nothing imo for the purpose it doing.
The things im enquiring about are how stable the system will be over an extended amount of time, and if other components will be more stable/reliable than other components, and if so, suggestions.
Thanks.

z0mbi3 · 6 Mar 2007 at 16:24

BoomAM said:
OCing will not help.

It won't hinder it either.

I know you want the best and everything, but any reason it has to be 30 fps? You could get away with a fair few less.

I'd personally go for JPEG snap shots but that's just my choice. I know it's a lot lower spec than what you're thinking of but it does make backup easier.

BoomAM · 6 Mar 2007 at 16:27

z0mbi3 said:
It won't hinder it either.

I know you want the best and everything, but any reason it has to be 30 fps? You could get away with a fair few less.

I'd personally go for JPEG snap shots but that's just my choice. I know it's a lot lower spec than what you're thinking of but it does make backup easier.

OCing, even if there is headroom, speedbining on the chosen parts, ect; isnt something desired for a system designed for stability. Better to run at stock/slower speeds than its capible of.
The camera are set to record in MPEG4 format. Jpegs are taken every 4 seconds anyway, but the video recording allows to see exactely what has been done. The frame rate is 30 to keep things smooth. The bandwidth/storage requirements between 30 & 15fps is relativly small.

melbourne720 · 6 Mar 2007 at 16:46

BoomAM said:
I was considering the option of stripping the three 500Gb drives. But in all fairness, the standard setup should be fast enough. So i might just set the software to record to one drive, when thats full, the next, and so on.

Maybe RAID 5 might be the way forward for you, as you want the fastest write access and some degree of redundancy.

BoomAM said:
No video manipulation will be done. Its simply an encoding/viewing jobbo.

Encoding is manipulating. You are taking uncompressed video and compressing it. An e6600 will certainly make that much faster.

BoomAM said:
No OCing will be done. Again, this is a system thats going to be on almost all the time. OCing will not help.

OCing will help because (a) it can be done at relatively low cost, little temp increase and very little hassle; (b) will speed up your system loads. For instance, my e6600 stays around 52 degrees full load, almost silent at over 3GHz

Dave M · 6 Mar 2007 at 17:18

Anything IO intensive will benefit from extra cache - I'd certainly recommend the 6600 for the 4MB cache.

Corasik · 6 Mar 2007 at 17:27

If its encoding 30 video streams at the same time, then recording at 15fps should greatly reduce the stress on the CPU. Perhaps enough allowing a more space efficient codec etc.

a Quad core CPU will be able to encode more streams in parallel, so might offer better performance.

Fr0dders · 6 Mar 2007 at 17:52

id defintely be thinking about RAID 5.

the intel 965 boards have 6 SATA II ports and can do RAID 5 across them

3 x 500 GB disks in RAID 5 would be 1 tb of RAID 5

defnitely see a big increase over JBOD.

BoomAM · 6 Mar 2007 at 20:41

melbourne720 said:
OCing will help because (a) it can be done at relatively low cost, little temp increase and very little hassle; (b) will speed up your system loads. For instance, my e6600 stays around 52 degrees full load, almost silent at over 3GHz

Im not arguing this point.
OCing can cause stability problems. Im not bothered what opinions you can come up with on that matter. Its just not gonna happen. Theres a reason why servers arnt shipped OCed.

Corasik said:
If its encoding 30 video streams at the same time

30 streams? Who said anything about 30? Its 10.

a Quad core CPU will be able to encode more streams in parallel, so might offer better performance.

A quad core is interesting, but the cost is a bit factor there.

RAID5 is tempting, but mobo RAID 5 99% of the time uses a lot of CPU time to do the calculations. So thats not really an option unfortunatelly.

melbourne720 · 6 Mar 2007 at 21:24

BoomAM said:
Im not arguing this point.
OCing can cause stability problems. Im not bothered what opinions you can come up with on that matter. Its just not gonna happen. Theres a reason why servers arnt shipped OCed.

Fair enough, you've clearly thought about it. Best of luck with the Project

BoomAM · 6 Mar 2007 at 21:33

melbourne720 said:
Fair enough, you've clearly thought about it. Best of luck with the Project

Dont get me wrong, i appriciate the input you've given.

.

z0mbi3 · 6 Mar 2007 at 22:02

slightly OT, but if everything (servers included) were shipped overclocked then people wouldn't buy top end procs.

BoomAM · 6 Mar 2007 at 22:07

z0mbi3 said:
slightly OT, but if everything (servers included) were shipped overclocked then people wouldn't buy top end procs.

Completely irrelevent. Servers arnt shipped OCed not because of the reason you've given, but because increased the speed of the processor/subsystems over the manufacturers recommended threshholds, can introduce, however small and insignificant, stability issues. Which isnt something thats wanted in a computer that needs to be 100% stable under any condition.

What im wondering, is that if the processor/mobo/mem/other combo ive picked, is reliable enough to be run as a system thats going to be on almost every day of the year.

melbourne720 · 6 Mar 2007 at 22:33

BoomAM said:
Dont get me wrong, i appriciate the input you've given. .

Thanks. Hope it goes well, it sounds quite ambitious

bluebox · 6 Mar 2007 at 23:04

Problem with RAID-5 is the performance hit. To match the speed of RAID-0, you need to double the number of disks when using RAID-1 and then double again when using RAID-5.

BoomAM · 7 Mar 2007 at 07:41

Ive had a brain wave! We were planning on getting a NAS as well for other needs.
I could scrap the NAS, and use the costs of that to bump the system specs on this up, so its got a Quad Core, a HW Raid controller, more/larger disks. And have a system capible of performing the occasional network disk read, and recording the video streams!
Providing i can find Win2k3 drivers for the HW chosen, should be great. Less overall cost, less space, less power usage.
And, it'd be easyier to persuade the uppers to get it if its got NAS abilitys build in!

z0mbi3 · 7 Mar 2007 at 09:38

BoomAM said:
Completely irrelevent. Servers arnt shipped OCed not because of the reason you've given, but because increased the speed of the processor/subsystems over the manufacturers recommended threshholds, can introduce, however small and insignificant, stability issues. Which isnt something thats wanted in a computer that needs to be 100% stable under any condition.

Pff rubbish! Any proc can be oc'd and be 100% stable. If it's not stable then you're running too high an overclock. It's as simple as that.

I get that you're against overclocking in this application, but there's no reason why you couldn't OC and have it run stable 24/7. Anyway I'll leave it now.

bluebox · 7 Mar 2007 at 10:15

z0mbi3 said:
Pff rubbish! Any proc can be oc'd and be 100% stable. If it's not stable then you're running too high an overclock. It's as simple as that.

I get that you're against overclocking in this application, but there's no reason why you couldn't OC and have it run stable 24/7. Anyway I'll leave it now.

Servers aren't overclocked because hardly anyone would buy one. When the tin cost is such a small part of the TCO then buying a faster CPU is a lot safer than OCing and for most applications where CPU speed is a limiting factor the software had been written to take advantage of clustering so if you need more welly just add more servers.
Finally there's always the option of going for a CPU with more grunt, like Power or Cell.

Sorry now gone completely off topic.

One thing I would check before going to the expense of quad core is if it will actually make any difference. You cna prove anything with benchmarks but unless you're running multiple threads then cores will be sitting ideal and you may find the more restricted memory bandwidth has a negative impact that outweighs the benefits of quad-core.