Mac Pro Configuration Upgrade Suggestions...
Hello,
I am updating the Mac Pro that is solely dedicated to SecuritySpy and am interested in some opinions for better efficiency. It is a mid-2012 2 x 3.07 GHz 6-core Intel Xeon machine running the latest version of Mac OS and SecuritySpy. It coordinates twelve Axis network cameras that are all H.264 based and no further recompression downstream. The cameras also capture video based upon motion detection with a hearty before/after buffer to include. Here are my questions:
1. Is it worth upgrading the startup hard drive that the Mac OS and SecuritySpy reside on to SSD? How about the hard drive(s) that harvest the incoming captured video? I presently have one SATA volume that “does the work” and separate SATA volumes that “store the work”. There has rarely been a CPU conflict. It seems as though I remember some logic for not wasting the money on SSD volumes a few years ago, but that may simply be because the technology was so expensive then.
2. How would you distribute the hard drives that store the captured video? Currently three volumes handle four of the cameras video feeds each and there is a balance of heavy/light use cameras per hard drive. I have used various RAID configurations in the past, but just didn’t see that all the trouble was worth it in the end. Maybe I didn’t experiment enough or maybe the overall technology is more advantageous.
3. Is it worth adding more video cards to coordinate four monitors? Currently I have two DVI dual-link monitors off of one stock video card. As I understand it, the cards handle most of the load and don’t effect the CPU usage that much. I want to expand the monitors to four and have two other legacy video cards that I can use.
Peace,
Dr. Z.
I am updating the Mac Pro that is solely dedicated to SecuritySpy and am interested in some opinions for better efficiency. It is a mid-2012 2 x 3.07 GHz 6-core Intel Xeon machine running the latest version of Mac OS and SecuritySpy. It coordinates twelve Axis network cameras that are all H.264 based and no further recompression downstream. The cameras also capture video based upon motion detection with a hearty before/after buffer to include. Here are my questions:
1. Is it worth upgrading the startup hard drive that the Mac OS and SecuritySpy reside on to SSD? How about the hard drive(s) that harvest the incoming captured video? I presently have one SATA volume that “does the work” and separate SATA volumes that “store the work”. There has rarely been a CPU conflict. It seems as though I remember some logic for not wasting the money on SSD volumes a few years ago, but that may simply be because the technology was so expensive then.
2. How would you distribute the hard drives that store the captured video? Currently three volumes handle four of the cameras video feeds each and there is a balance of heavy/light use cameras per hard drive. I have used various RAID configurations in the past, but just didn’t see that all the trouble was worth it in the end. Maybe I didn’t experiment enough or maybe the overall technology is more advantageous.
3. Is it worth adding more video cards to coordinate four monitors? Currently I have two DVI dual-link monitors off of one stock video card. As I understand it, the cards handle most of the load and don’t effect the CPU usage that much. I want to expand the monitors to four and have two other legacy video cards that I can use.
Peace,
Dr. Z.
Comments
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1) If its only being used for security spy and nothing else, SSD won't gain much - although they are more reliable than traditional drives. For storage they could help if the regular SATA HDDs couldn't keep up. (typical HDD can sequential write at 100-150 MB/s, typical SSD should be at least 400 MB/s with many 500+ MB/s - it's more likely to run into an IOpersecond limit on a traditional drive than it is raw speed - capturing video and possibly still frames from 12 cameras. I've setup some Mac Pro's with an SSD in the 2nd optical bay for boot drive - so we could do Raid 1+0 for the 4 drives in the regular bays for raw storage to get speed and some redundancy (works out to about 250 MB/s for sequential writes, and just about doubles the IO)
2) I have my 6-7 cameras going to mirrored 2 TB drives (technically thats even over USB 3, I'm running a Mac mini with 4 bay USB enclosure), no issues with performance. Of course I have things tuned a bit so it's only about 1 to 1.5 MB/s of data coming in from the cameras during the day, a bit less at night. 2 Camera's continuous recording, the rest on motion. I always at least mirror drives if the data may be important - drives will fail, its just a matter of time.
3) Adding another video card to get up to 4 monitors can be worth it, another Radeon 5770 or something like that should be easy to add, correct that it shouldn't affect CPU. I've done this with a couple of Mac Pro's at work both in production and for monitoring. -
BrianM,
Thanks for the info!
Is there any rule of thumb for configuring which cameras get written to which drives (and how those volumes might be configured via RAID)? How about a calculator similar to the excellent overall specs one that the SecuritySpy Help page has had for years? In the past this process has just been trial/error for me. With the upgrade of two 2MP cameras in my arsenal of twelve units and the need for more constant capture situations, it is time I got more scientific for efficiency.
Also, do you feel that the RAID capability with Mac OS 11x is reliable enough or do you suggest a third-part software like SoftRAID?
Peace,
Dr. Z. -
Not sure about a calculator, just need to watch (through activity monitor for example)/figure out how much data is writing per second on average, and maximum burst (if all cameras triggered at once - are they just writing video? or pictures as well - if its pictures as well you might run into IO limits with 12 cameras to a single HDD - could do some tests to see if you get dropped frames or spinning wheel in the OS, but as I mentioned before, if you did a RAID 1+0 it should be able to handle 12 cameras no problem)
the built-in Mac OS X Software raid is still reliable - was afraid it was being depreciated when there was no GUI in 10.11 - but 10.12 (Sierra) has the Raid functions added back to the new Disk Utility as has been seen in the public beta.
at work I have around 80 Macs running mirrored drives with the software raid, and 2 Mac Pro's with Raid 1+0 (2 sets of 2 drives mirrored, then stripped together for speed) I do weekly run commands on the macs to check RAID status (thank goodness for Apple Remote Desktop - or look visually in Disk Utility if I'm already doing other work on the computer) - and every couple of weeks or so there will be an issue, but so far in the past 2 years if there is an issue it's because one drive has started to fail. (2 times it was not a drive failure - in both of those cases it was after a power failure, and was able to just re-add the disk the RAID had dropped, completely normal operation after the rebuilt - one was about 1.5 years ago - the other about 6 months ago)
Wish it was as easy with Windows for doing mirrored boot disks.
I do like SoftRaid's utility that allows for certifying a drive before setting up a raid, I've used it before putting disks into my NAS - give the drives a good day or so of testing. SoftRAID is reliable, but you do need to make sure that there isn't an issue before updating the OS (sometimes have to update SoftRAID before the OS)
An advantage for the built-in RAID functions is being able to grab 2 disks and move them to another Mac where they will "just work" -
I concur with BrianM that an SSD won't gain a huge amount. It will however make starting up and general interaction with the Mac faster, and SecuritySpy does write some temporary files to the startup drive (e.g. emails that are about to be sent, and cached data for the web server), so there may be a small speed boost there.
For the actual drives that are recording the video footage you don't need an SSD - a fast mechanical drive (HDD) should be easily fast enough, and far more cost-effective.
So a modest SSD for the startup drive combined with one or more large HDDs for the capture drives would be a good solution. For up to 16 H.264 cameras I would say you don't need multiple capture drives or RAID solutions (unless you want a mirrored RAID for greater resilience to drive failure).
As for the extra monitors, adding them shouldn't significantly increase the CPU usage unless the graphics hardware runs out of memory, so make sure to use video cards with lots of VRAM.
