Recording to external drive?
How many 3mp cameras can I run if I want to record to a external usb 3.0 drive? What bottlenecks first, network, processor, usb 3.0 bandwidth? I usually run my cams with motion detection recording so it is rare that all are recording at once. Recently I have been getting an error that computer can't keep up would that be processor? I'm using a dual core Mac mini 1.6 but thinking of upgrading to a current iMac or similar. Thanks in advance!
Comments
-
USB 3.0 is very fast, and if you use MPEG-4 or H.264 video compression, along with motion detection, then hard drive speed won't be a problem - you will be limited by CPU first.
That error message will be referring to the computer's CPU not being able to keep up with processing the video. 3 MP is a very high resolution and if you have several of these cameras this will put a high load on a dual-core Mac mini. To mitigate this you could reduce the frame rates of your cameras (or upgrade your Mac, as you mentioned).
Check out our System Requirements Calculator that will tell you what kind of Mac you will need for a particular configuration. -
Thanks for the quick reply! If CPU is bottleneck what about recording to a network drive(Apple time capsule connected to gigabit switch ) ?
-
Yes, you can record to a Time Capsule drive - simply mount it on your Mac (via the Shared section on the left of any Finder window), and set it as the capture destination for your cameras in SecuritySpy.
However, I would say that a USB 3.0 drive would be better: aside from USB 3.0 being a faster connection than gigabit ethernet, it's also a direct connection to the computer and therefore more reliable than a network connection. And in any case using a network drive instead of a USB drive will have no impact on the CPU usage of SecuritySpy.
