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Help with specs of new SS server, please

edited January 2020 in SecuritySpy
Hello, I'm speccing out a SS revision and upgrade and I would appreciate this Community's input. Currently have 11 cameras on a 2010 Mac Pro. H.264, frame rate currently at 12, and most cameras are 2MP but we have a few 8MP and as we replace cameras we're going with higher resolution. We plan to run a total of 18 cameras. We have a recently upgraded, industry standard gigabit network and fiber gigabit ISP.

I have visited the very helpful SecuritySpy System Requirements calculator. For space saving reasons I've received feedback that a Mac Mini form factor would be preferred but my inclination is to go with the iMac (27-inch, Early 2019) Intel Core i9-9900K, 3.6 GHz, 8 cores.

1. do you agree that the top specced Mac Mini does not have sufficient horsepower for this job?
2. we would prefer to use the above referenced iMac, not the iMac Pro- do you agree?
3. how much RAM?
4. we plan to get 512GB or 1TB internal SSD with external storage- should we attach external storage via USB3 or USB-C?
5. do you have experience with a particular brand and model of external hard drive you like?
6. iMac comes with AMD Radeon Pro 580X graphics processor with 8GB of dedicated GDDR5 memory. Is the graphics upgrade to Radeon Pro Vega 48 with 8GB of HBM2 memory recommended?

Thank you for your feedback.

Comments

  • edited January 2020
    I have an installation which is running 15 cameras on 2MP with 15 fps

    For this we use a self build computer with i3-8100 cpu and 8 GB RAM = simular to a Mac mini 2018. The average cpu usage is around 15%

    the advantage of a self build computer is that you can easily expand your storage capacity to your needs and at much lower cost. In this computer we have 2x 4TB SATA hard drives

    If you want a computer for 18 cameras with 8MP, I would go for an i7-8700K or i9-9900K cpu and 16GB of RAM
    (the calculator indicates that an i7-8700 would have a 83% cpu usage)
  • The top-spec Mac mini (6-core, i7-8700B, 3.2 GHz) is a very capable machine but the iMac that you mention is significantly faster due to its higher number or cores and clock speed - approximately 44% faster, according to Geekbench. Of course, the iMac is significantly more expensive, and physically larger, so the best thing to do is use the calculator to model how each of the systems would perform with your desired setup.

    As for your other questions:

    1. It depends. The Mac mini would be fully loaded - and probably struggling somewhat - with 18 cameras at 8 MP and 12 fps, but if you simply reduce your frame rate requirement to 8-10fps instead then it should be able to cope well. Similarly, if not all cameras will be as high as 8 MP resolution then this also reduces CPU load significantly.

    2. Yes, in fact this Mac is actually faster than the base model iMac Pro, and can decode more H.264/H.265 streams in hardware than the iMac Pro, so it is a good choice for SecuritySpy.

    3. I would recommend 32 GB.

    4. 512GB for the internal SSD is plenty (in fact, 256 GB should be fine unless you have some other need for a larger system drive). For storage of video footage, I would suggest two separate 3.5 inch external HDD drives, 4 TB each, and split the cameras between them. USB-3 or USB-C would work equally well (they are both so fast that the speed limitation is going to be the drive itself, not the bus). Two drives gives you double the speed as one (although you might also like to consider a RAID 5 setup if you need fault tolerance, though this is more complex, expensive, and slower). Note that I'm assuming here that you're going to use motion-triggered recording; if you will instead be using continuous recording for long periods of time, then your storage requirement will be much higher.

    5. The best brands seem to change over time. I generally keep an eye on the failure rates published by Backblaze, and in general what drives they use (e.g. Hard Drive Failure Stats for Q2 2019) to see what the best manufacturers/models are.

    6. The standard graphics are perfectly fine for SecuritySpy - I don't think it would be worth paying for this upgrade.

    Hope this helps!
  • Thank you both very much for your help and I appreciate the benefit of your experience. We are eager to get the new system up and running- and when that happens, I'll report back here briefly with an update. Cheers!
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