Mac Studio Storage Question

Marty

I have been using an M1 Mac Mini with Security Spy for a year or more and it works perfectly.

I now have a Mac Studio M1 Max and use it for all my other computing needs. I was considering moving Security Spy to it, but would like more storage. What are suggestions on how to connect external storage? The two ports on the front are USB 3 only and not thunderbolt like the back. Is USB 3 a bottle neck for external SSDs?

If I get a large regular external HDD like maybe a WD or Seagate HDD (8GB or more) would that be a bottle neck with the older spinning drives. I do use the iOS app a lot to pull up recordings as well as the app on Apple TV to pull up recordings.

Of course internal would be the fastest I know, but would there be a noticeable difference? Should I get an external SSD instead vs external HDD? Any thoughts and advice is greatly appreciated.

Just a thought Ben, but I'm sure this is not possible with the system, or not really practical to do. It would be nice to store the latest, for example, 100GB of data on the internal storage, and as the recordings age, move them to external storage. That way the newest recordings, which I most want to see would be on the fastest storage, but then archived automatically to slower storage.

Thanks much for any suggestions.

Marty

Ben

Hi Marty,

Your main choice here, and the one that will make the most difference in terms of speed, is SSD vs. HDD. Which one you go for depends on a few things: firstly, the number of cameras you are using, and the recording settings. The more cameras you have, and the more you are using continuous-capture rather than motion-capture recording, and the higher the frames rates of your cameras, the faster you will need the storage to be. But, if you are using motion-capture, with moderate frame rates, on a system that isn't huge (e.g. 32 cameras or fewer) then a HDD will be sufficient. Second, of course, is cost: SSDs are much more expensive. Third is reliability, with SSDs being generally more reliable than HDDs. If cost is not an issue, and you want the best performance possible, go for SSD storage.

For an HDD, USB-3 will be more than sufficient; the bottleneck here will be the drive not the interface. For SSD, Thunderbolt is preferred but USB-3 will be perfectly fine, being far more performant than you will need even for the largest camera system.

Your idea for captured files rotation from internal to external storage is a good one - SecuritySpy doesn't have such a feature at the moment, but we will consider this for the future.

Marty

Thanks very much Ben for your quick response and informative reply. The information really does help very much. Thanks regarding the suggestion of rotating off older recordings. Security Spy is certainly feature rich enough as is. The reliability and low resource usage of SecuritySpy is truly amazing.

Right now everything is on the internal storage on a 2 TB SSD on the M1 Mac Mini and everything is running perfectly. At most the CPU percentage probably stays around 15 to 20% total as reported by the SecuritySpy web interface so I’ll probably just keep the cameras on the Mac mini and use it as a server. There are only 12 cameras but I do 30 frames per second on the ones that support 30 fps (or highest available) but only motion detection.

This is also the main computer for my wife but even during most intense usage I’ve never seen the CPU go above probably 50%. With time we will probably put it into service as a server only with neither one of us using it as a computer but just a camera server. So it will probably serve us for many years.

Thanks again.

Marty

Marty

Marty

Ben, I just wanted to include the screenshot to show you the typical usage I see. I think I’ll keep all on the M1 Mac Mini. I failed to include it is the 16GB ram version. All runs perfectly as is and I don’t foresee many more cameras for now. Marty

og013

Hi Ben, I second what Marty has suggested here. I was about to ask if the the same offloading of recordings to another location based on age/size as I'm in the same boat. M1 mini and only have 512GB of SSD so running 14 cameras @ 8MP is filling it up with less than a week of recordings. I have a 6TB HDD that I manually copy recordings off to at the moment .

Thanks

Oskar

Ben

Hi Oskar, thanks for the comment. While this is a nice idea, it isn't a high priority feature for us to implement. The reason is that generally it's so easy and inexpensive to add dedicated external storage for SecuritySpy that this kind of feature won't be useful for the vast majority of users. So although this is a possible feature for us to add in the future if we see demand for it, at this point the demand doesn't seem sufficient for us to invest the development resources.

I would recommend capturing directly to your external HDD drive, or if you would like the high performance of an SSD, you could add a 1-2 TB external SSD connected over USB or Thunderbolt, and dedicate this to SecuritySpy. Internal SSDs are not ideal to use as capture destinations for SecuritySpy, as they tend to be of limited size, and you don't want to be putting constant load on these as this shortens their lifespan.

ChrisNicholson

I, too, would like this feature. Maybe a compromise is to be able to specify an "Active" and an "Archive" storage path for each camera. Active would work exactly as it does now. In Browser, system first scans Active and presents results then, in background, scans Archive and adds those results in. If this is hard, then (if Archive path has been supplied), have a toggle to have Browser work in Active mode or Archive mode.

The idea being that the user has to do the file management using tool of choice (or Finder), but there's a convenient was to search/browse the Archive.

Just a thought.