 That's fun. No, that was kind of on purpose because it's funny because it's recording I'm not good at stacking things I'm actually not great at building these things but Steve is so he's going to assemble all these parts into this because it's time to build a Unify video server with a bunch of hard drives to match the bunch of cameras That's they're gonna be attached to this so without further ado We're gonna get started on assembling all this stuff into a computer and we'll talk about the build process afterwards Our unify MVR is assembled We've actually been testing with it for a couple days because you always I like to run them for a little while and have them Record on some cameras make sure there's no hiccups or issues We even go through the trouble of randomly unplugging it and plugging it back in to make sure it restarts and recovers Because just because it's gonna be installed in the server room and it will have a UPS on it doesn't mean something might happen So that's just an important test And it's way better to do it here at our office before it gets installed into a client room It is survived the abuse and I'm overly happy with it like this has been a really nice build It's not the first one we done. It's just the first one we've done on video So a couple of things we went with these eight terabyte Death Star NAS drives, and I kind of like the funny marketing 7200 rpm it is up to 20% faster than other 5400 rpm drives Funny on the marketing, but the reality of these Death Star NAS I've chose them they have been on the backblaze list of reliable hard drives If you follow any of the videos I've talked about that and my experience in the field with them has been Equally good. I've found great reliability out of those drives So we also went with the AMD Ryzen now. We went with just the Ryzen 3 here, and this is the Ryzen 3 2200 G Vega with the Vega graphics and the MSI X370 board Now the Unify NVR because the cameras themselves break things down into H.264 means there's not a lot of processor power needed for Getting the camera on the video and a rendering things like that Some of the other tools we've used previously different NVR software it heavily relies on the processor So with the NVR builds when we're doing Unify much less so so it's not as big of a deal that you don't have like a Really fast processor now someone's undoubtedly going to comment. Why didn't you go enterprise? Well, that really wasn't in their budget because we have six eight terabyte of these NAS drives And we've built this before similar system before they're very reliable out in the field We haven't any issues with them and the nice thing is when you use standardized hardware if anything goes wrong I can just swap it I know I could have spent about four times as much and bought like a Enterprise product with a next-day business on site and things like that if the budget would have allowed that great It doesn't there's a pretty substantial price difference between what we built here Which if you add up the parts is pretty reasonable compared to Some of the servers we built and you know, I've said this before and I'll leave it here Comes down to the client if they got the budget for it and these have proved very reliable Now how we set these drives up is in a raid six and we use these Kingwind drive base we've used them a few times before and they just work great. So this is a Rose will Roswell case the I'll leave links to everything that we use to build this so you can get exactly the same parts if you're interested in Copying this bill and they're pretty basic rack mount server cases They certainly get the job done. We've used a few of these before I like the way they have the stabilizer bar because they're not as heavy-duty as some of the other cases So they're a little bit thinner but with this bar right here that keeps it from torquing around and it actually is Quite solid and doesn't move around a lot Now it came with this in it and it's got their own little trays for holding drives, which is cool We just wanted something and it's Just easier once this becomes rack mounted because it doesn't have any rails or anything If there's ever a dry feel you'd be able just to pop a drive out and the overall expensive build that doesn't add too much To have the drives easily accessible for us to just pop them out And I'll turn around real quick and show you these are the dry bays We didn't put the labels on them, but we will put labels on each one So we know which drive it is that we if a driver goes bad we can just pop it out to rebuild the radar a And it's a tool list design So no little screws and stuff to mess with it's just easy to get things in and out And it keeps the wiring and everything really clean on the inside So if I ever have to you know get a drive out of here No big deal slide it out put it in on the off chance they go bad And I can I don't have the key in it right now But I can then lock the front of the case to keep people from touching the front of it But there's six on board say does so there's no extra cards We're added to this at all and we're using the on board NVMe drive to boot and we got the smallest one within reason because we don't really save much to the boot drive We load Debian on here. That's my preferred way to build the servers We seem to have the least amount of problems with them We've tried running windows before because this is something that comes up a lot is People want to build the nvr and then watch the nvr The problem is Watching the nvr is actually a little bit more taxing because you watch it via web browsers That web browser has to be constantly running at the same time it's recording We've built systems like this and that is where you have to think about if you want it to do that If you want the nvr to both record and then read back all those files and be playing them on a screen Then you have to can take that into consideration or build because this is going in a rack And they're going to use another computer to view them No problems at all. And so we don't have to worry about what os is on here And we find the least amount of trouble being like I said a w one But if you go with a windows box Then you have the issues that come inherent with windows making sure you don't have any updates turned on or scheduled Because you obviously lose recordings when you do that versus, you know running it like this So that's why this is my preferred way when we sell the jobs We we sell them as get a separate computer just for viewing that way If something happens reviewing computer gets updated. You just reboot it. No big deal Now we use the mdma mdam Raid setup and then I loaded a cockpit to make it easy to administer for not just me but for People who don't know the command line very well. Maybe some of my staff That is and I'll show you how that works here in a second That allows us to Easily if there's ever a problem with the drive you can use a web interface on there I've talked about web min and I've talked about cockpit in the past. Cockpit's just a nice easy way to do it We also load net data on here so we can get statistics on the machine If we ever need to dig into any type of problems that are going on And I'm going to show you that in a second here when we get to the software part of this Now the other nice thing is Without having a special Isation here. It's a pretty straightforward load. You just load demian load java Add that library on there, which is probably the trickiest part, which isn't all that tricky There's plenty of instructions on how to do that Then you load the eu to find nbr software so this keeps it very clean There's nothing else loaded on here. So there's nothing else to really have to worry about The other thing is I know someone's probably saying well, what about a free ns? What about zfs the problems I've had with those is the only way to get the unify software to work And maybe this will change in the future. But it's a run it inside of a free ns gl I considered it But I played around with it and I just didn't find it to be the most reliable System when there's updates. It just seems a little I'm going to put the word hacky to put together not as clean This is a really nice clean boots every time boots immediately a matter of fact the The splash screen that comes up for the motherboard is the longest part of the boot process It only boots in about four or five seconds at most and that's it. It's running it right away starts to unify nbr everything Starts recording. So rebooting. This is not even a big deal at all other than the fact that it pauses on the screen That's like the longest part of the process and then the two second countdown timer while the grub menu loads and debbie And while it counts down in case you want to boot into something else. So it's nice solid great performance Um It survived all of our power cycling tests, you know, of course you went into bios He said it's auto power on in case of power loss, etc, etc But it's worked really well now one of the things that you have to consider and this is the big issue And this has no problem performing with this and we had a client that caused a little bit of a problem With something we didn't expect we specced out a machine able to Handle the number of cameras they had and this particular machine needs a long record time And they're going to have about 35 cameras on it when it's fully deployed We have nine of them here the other ones are already installed or being in a process of being installed onsite the client We're waiting for the rest of the facility to be built to get the rest of these in But the concern we had and a problem the client created the unexpected Was they decided that they wanted to have like five people coming through the videos all the time And it wasn't the inbound that the uh system was choking on it turned out to be the outbound This is actually where I like having tools like net data and dubbing because it's really easy to start seeing a problem Because the client doesn't tell you that they gave the same login to all these different people in management And they all just like playing with the camera videos And then reading back all those camera videos was taxing the system more than writing to the system And it was slowing down so them complaining about being slow turned out Was easy to source when we seen the outbound traffic was so dramatic on the machine and you find out so This is where the rate array and the 7200 rpm drives really make a big difference We've installed before some of the western digital purple Drives for single like four camera small offices and things like that and they work great and a single drive system and you're not Actively having someone constantly combing through it and it's reasonably fast to look up videos But when you talk about 30 cameras recording and then a bunch of recordings and then having a bunch of people come back and read That's where you want to get a faster and faster rate array There comes a point and maybe at one point we'll build one big enough Where because we have a proposal out for a client that's going to be all done with enterprise hardware and it's going to have A massive storage array because they want full-time non-stop video recording And that might be a case where you have the unify nvr and then a separate Storage controller all together because they're talking around 200 terabytes of storage. So that would be something I'm hoping it gets approved and I'm hoping it's something we'll actually be able to film But some of these unfortunately end up delivered directly on site and they're in secure facilities Which is why they need this so you can't bring cameras in there But I'll at least talk about it if it happens because it's a pretty cool build idea we have and hopefully it works But uh, that's pretty much it. I'll show you the software real quick and show you what it looks like running But it's it's really impressive how well this works The other thing that I really like is at idle without the cameras recording I think it goes down to about 72 watts sometimes maybe 68 I've seen a kind of fluctuate bounce them back and forth depending on when you're looking at the Cameras and stuff for you know doing a video feed out of it But the peak with all cameras recording is only about 90 or so watch Which is impressive when you think that we have six eight terabytes 7200 p.m Drives and everything else and all the cameras will nine of them that we have so far Turned on for full-time record We are able to like I said it sits about 90 92 watts So a low wattage is nice not just because of the power bill but also because of the heat This is a really cool build like nothing's warm at all Even running even writing to the hard drives. It's not stressing them Everything stays nice and cool now these uh kingwin ssd It's got a kingwin drive bays too. They have fans on them So they keep the airflow well an airflow all flows very very nicely through here without there's not like a blow dryer Effect as I felt with some servers you put your hand on the back and you're like Oh, yeah, you can just feel the heat pumping out of here That goes back to one of the nice things about the rise and just they're generally in a fairly efficient processor Wattage wise so they don't they don't generate a ton of heat. So that's really a definitely a bonus here So take a look at the software and I don't that'll wrap this up. So here's a look at the debbie and nine system Running for this nvr. Here's a look at the system and you can see right now I have all nine cameras connected. They're all set to record and it's barely peeking out the cpu Some of these spikes you see we're me logging in and opening up and playing with the machine But when we're not actively doing anything like right now, you can see it pretty much sits here at idle Now the storage here's all those drives set up and we'll get into the details here This is all done on extent four. It's a raid six six disc system and we have 29 Uh tib usable storage here out of the total. So we've got it set up as a raid six So we have a little bit of redundancy in here that was enough to meet with the storage requirements and the redundancy requirements for this particular project And like I said, this is all pretty straightforward stuff The nvr the net data dashboard that we installed I've talked about net data before you can find it in other videos This is a great tool to try to dig into all the different things in the processes and we'll actually show you What's going on here? So let's look at the system overview and then we're going to go ahead and Play with the cameras at the same time So here's the cameras. Here's the dashboard. So watch the cpu usage Which you can see here and you can see the load on a machine. So we'll go ahead and open up the live view And the act of opening up made the camera jump made the camera system use a little bit So still not much disc reader right going on. It's overall pretty Pretty mundane in terms of usage if we go through the recordings Like I said, the system is nice and fast even with just these nine cameras No problem. Any recording I want to jump to for whatever day is pretty much immediate. So let's actually filter it backwards I think we got something on a 24th. Yeah, that's when we first turned it on Yeah, nothing on that particular day 25th. Okay. Here's at night So you can see it pretty much instantly jumps to any point Here's where we turn on the lights in the studio when we came in The cameras are just laying on the table right now We just turn them on full-time record to do some testing with them and play around with the motion record So it's actually filtering for the motion events So you can actually filter it out and say only show me the full-time recording versus the motion events So on and so forth But you can see it's really hardly doing anything to the system and if we look over here It will go to the dashboard memory Out of the 32 gigs of RAM we have installed this we're peaked out at eight gigs right now Now this will scale up a bit once we start putting some things in But a lot of this is actually going towards the process of viewing not the recording of it So as the people log in and start viewing this and there's a lot of streams going out It has to create some sessions Same with the network IO overall you can see the network IO is pretty low here But when we do things like we're going to grab a group of videos and hit download all Whoops I grabbed way too many I hit all the videos I have noticed that if you try to grab like a few hundred videos that I've unified It'll just give a page here I think it's probably that the page can't render that many at once It's probably not the best thing to try to download hundreds of videos at a time out of the unified system Just because you can doesn't mean you should so let's go ahead and just grab a smaller number of videos Okay, select a couple different videos here download all And you see a little blip of 320 but overall when you're looking at the memory Hardly any more memory usage disk IO just a little peak here. It's certainly nothing that will overtax these drives Like I said the system remains really fast And that's obviously a really big deal if you have a lot of people viewing in that making sure that the system leaves Fast and in the cpu throughout this entirety of this Barely anything on the cpu. There's those couple blips where I probably grabbed too many Files at once and caused the cpu to blip, but that's about it mostly sitting here And these are nine cameras full-time recording when we're not viewing stuff While we're viewing but not actually actively going through the archives the processors barely getting over even You know 10 percent sitting here So like I said, the Ryzen is plenty powerful enough to do this and it's just the basic Ryzen 3 So it doesn't take a ton of cpu But you have to make sure you don't have a bottleneck in your i o and like I said That's where you can dig into some of this and kind of take a look at it With think with tools like net data and see what's going on and look at the number of processes running and things like that So hopefully this was helpful. Uh, and like I said when you're building these I'm hoping to keep building bigger and bigger ones. I've seen people in the forums who've built some that are really large I'd like to get to that point Um, and maybe have a sail right there But for doing this it's going to be I think in total 36 cameras on this machine This seems to be more than fast enough Like I said, even at nine here, we're barely even taxing the system at all Um, and we've have all the 30 camera systems with similar builds that have been working great But I do recommend these faster hard drives, especially if you have a lot of people doing Reads and writes and pulling a lot of data. All right. Thanks Thanks for watching. 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