You are not alone. Our SVR also now shows 1579.8
Strange. Back-up partition? Ghosts? I’ll be speaking to one of their video leads to get some information regarding the questions/concerns that have been posted thus far. This will be chief among them.
Seems a bit shady if you ask me. What could possibly need 140-280GB?
I could understand maybe up to 1GB for backend stuff (recovery/updates/etc), but 140GB per Drive? That’s excessive. I want to know exactly what it is for.
Apparently the estimation algorithm for available space was edited. That is likely an errant number. It will probably be adjusted again soon. They were probably adjusting unused space on the drive to balance performance and processing.
Apparently the estimation algorithm for available space was edited. That is likely an errant number.
I actually installed them on my PC. Both drives are raw (no file systems)…so the video on them may be difficult to recover/access without data recovery tools.
There are two partitions:
1.86 GB
929.65 GB
I went and wiped out the 1.86 GB Raw partition on both (hopefully the SVR will “format” them to what it wants, and recreate)
Unallocated:
The SVR formatted, and restored. Same errant reported capacity.
To update the above, I decided to go with the RAID 1 mirror array this time around.
My reasoning is that if in future my drives are needed for say investigation/evidence (burglary, or other incident for example), I can give up one HDD, and keep the other (and simply obtain another Purple WD 1TB HDD, and rebuild the array).
If I kept the RAID 0 stripped array, I would most likely lose both drives in such an event.
I have tested the two USB ports…they work, but there doesn’t appear to be a way to use them at this time.
It should be suggested to ADC to add the option to the cloud interface (website and mobile) to allow USB thumb drive/hard drive recognition, and an option to save time based clips locally to the USB drive.
The only downside I see is there is currently no way to access the saved video locally via the LAN, and while the two USB ports appear functional, they dont seem to be supported for say plugging in a thumbdrive or hard drive to copy time based clips at this time.
The only SVR/NVR interface is cloud based on alarm.com, website or mobile app, and any saved time based clips (30 sec up to 5 min duration), must be uploaded to, then downloaded from the ADC cloud (which has a direct impact on the image quality of the clip and is on par with other ADC cloud based video/Image clip downloads).
Today, I pressed play on every event showing on the timeline. Once the cameras started playing not one camera was close in time to any of the events that supposedly were taking place. This makes finding things that took place difficult.
ADC still hasn’t fixed the eronneous drive capacity…
The drive capacity is not entirely erroneous. This was actually a Vivotek algorithm which limits drive capacity based on the capabilities of the cameras. At 30 FPS and 720P, a large chunk of storage is required to be free to properly overwrite a days worth of footage. A smaller chunk needs to be left free to optimize performance (if you’ve ever completely filled a hard drive you know what I mean).
It all boils down to a smaller expected total storage size.
Honestly, I believe 30 FPS to be a bit ridiculous overkill. This is recorded video for security purpose. Even for novelty purpose, 15 would be more than sufficient.
The drive capacity is not entirely erroneous. This was actually a Vivotek algorithm which limits drive capacity based on the capabilities of the cameras. At 30 FPS and 720P, a large chunk of storage is required to be free to properly overwrite a days worth of footage
This does not require 280GB of capacity in a striped array (or even 140GB in a mirrored array)
A days worth of 30fps @720p for 1 cam is 1-2 GB…
Just for the sake of argument: let’s say 30fps @ 720p for 24 hours is 10 gb… 4 times that is 40 GB.
That leaves 10 GB for performance optimization.
40-50GB is all that required of the storage to be able to properly overwrite a days worth of footage. I smell BS.
Where are you getting those calculations?
@ 1280 x 1024 res, H.264, High Video Quality, 4 cameras, 24/7 recording, @30 FPS you are using roughly 400 GB per day on average.
@ 1200 x 800 you are using right around the allocated space.
Video Recording takes up monstrous amounts of data when recorded in real time. This is why I say that 30 FPS is totally unnecessary and should be avoided generally. Certain institutions require it, but those are things like casinos. Unless you need to catch David Blaine picking your pocket, you can go with a lower FPS.
Well according to ADC after two days I am still at 0% (1% of 1579 GB is 15.7 GB)
Last time I did a calculation when it still reported 1859 GB capacity, ADC said there were over 400 days before the striped drive was overwritten.
That means approx 4.5 GB per 24 hour period at 1280x1080 720p 30fps per camera. I approximate it will take 3 days for me to hit 1% of capacity (15 GB)
So…four times that is roughly 20 GB a day, plug throw in alittle extra…lets double it…50 GB.
No where close to 140-280 GB.
That is the erroneous setting. My SVR also reports 0% used. The local storage option is not pulling hard drive usage at all it seems. I spoke with ADC regarding this already.
How may days does yours report till it overwrites the drive?
I got mine prior to this arbitrary capacity limit. It said over 400 days (425 if I remember correctly)
That equates to approx 4.37 GB per camera, per 24 hour period using 30fps at 1280x1080 720p
That was the calculation before they screwed it all up. 140gb- 280gb is BS you dont need that much.
A 90 min 720p HD movie is only around 600 MB…that would be a 9 GB if the movie was 24 hours using optimal compression codecs.
The days calculation is wrong because it is tied to the incorrect storage calculation.
The typical NVR you need to finely adjust settings to achieve three weeks of storage capacity (FPS, Res, Quality).
If the Alarm.com SVR can store 400 days of recordings at 30 FPS then they should probably put a price tag on it of somewhere around $40,000.
At 1 FPS you would be using 2.5+ GB per camera per day.
The fewer the cameras, the more days of recordings you will get, of course. I would guess that using RAID 1, 1 camera, 30 FPS at max settings, you would be looking at about 9 days of storage. At 10 FPS, you would triple that to a little under 1 month.
If the Alarm.com SVR can store 400 days of recordings at 30 FPS then they should probably put a price tag on it of somewhere around $40,000.At 1 FPS you would be using 2.5+ GB per camera per day
That would only work if no file compression was being used by the NVR.
That’s not how file compression works.
A 90 min 720p HD movie is only around 600 MB…that would be 9 GB if the movie was 24 hours using optimal compression codecs.
I am pretty sure a 720p HD movie is at more than 4fps.
Am I off in left field here?
If you want to plan your settings to optimize performance and storage capacity (days of footage) there are a great number of NVR storage calculators you can find online. I always suggest people use one when they opt for a 24/7 local recording solution.
Here is one.
Here is another.
Here is one from Vivotek (OEM)
H.264 standard can be viewed as a “family of standards” composed of the profiles described below.
… It is thus common to refer to the standard with names such as H.264/AVC, AVC/H.264, H.264/MPEG-4 AVC, or MPEG-4/H.264 AVC, to emphasize the common heritage.
Most full length movies at 720p res are encoded with .mp4 (H.264/MPEG-4), and for 90-120 min or so are file size of approx 600-700 MB
I would suggest using the Vivotek Design Tool link above to most accurately predict the storage capacity.
For an example of the sheer size required: Max Settings, 4 Cameras, 7 days of recording: 2147.727 GB
Jason,
Has ADC said anything about viewing and saving video from our Home networks using the best Frame Rates and Resolution or any of the other questions and observations I made in my long post. As far as I see it, unless they really loosen their control on this unit allowing us to view and download outside of ADC uploading and then downloading, then it really does not matter how they allocate, format, encrypt or anything else with the hard drives. The unit would be to crippled to consider it.