Vehicle Mounted Array - What hard drives?


Berg

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I’m in the planning stages to build an UNRAID array to be installed aboard a vehicle (think a truck or SUV) to be used to store media and content captured directly aboard the vehicle (think dash cams) as well as with video and photography gear that will capture high quality content but will be transferred for safe storage once back to “home base” (the vehicle) while travelling.

 

I’d also like to store entertainment media while travelling aboard that vehicle.

 

What I’m wondering is what types of hard drives should I consider to build this array?

 

I’m assuming that solid state drives are most resistant to vibration , but is that true? And how do they handle the read/write cycles of an array?

 

Or would laptop drives be more appropriate for the vibration environment? They would be cheaper than SSDs

 

Does anyone have experience with this type of application?

 

Thanks In advance.

 

 

 

 

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Random food for thought, no real answers here.

 

1. Temperature control - how stable can you keep the temperature inside the housing? Consumer electronics designed for dwellings don't like huge swings, so the more stable you can keep temperature and humidity the better. 40F is fine, 110F is fine, changing from one to the other in a few hours or minutes is devastating for longevity.

2. Vibration and impact - you already are well aware of the need to keep both below specified limits, the way to do that can be accomplished with mounting. Since you specified truck / suv, perhaps damped mass would be a good way. If the rack is heavy enough and mounted with damped springs, you can use standard desktop hard drives without issue.

 

Drive spin down can be used to good effect, if your active workload is kept on SSD cache or unassigned devices, the array can be mostly spun down and only spun up when moving data onto the array for near line archive, and when parked for your end of day entertainment.

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Random food for thought, no real answers here.
 
1. Temperature control - how stable can you keep the temperature inside the housing? Consumer electronics designed for dwellings don't like huge swings, so the more stable you can keep temperature and humidity the better. 40F is fine, 110F is fine, changing from one to the other in a few hours or minutes is devastating for longevity.
2. Vibration and impact - you already are well aware of the need to keep both below specified limits, the way to do that can be accomplished with mounting. Since you specified truck / suv, perhaps damped mass would be a good way. If the rack is heavy enough and mounted with damped springs, you can use standard desktop hard drives without issue.
 
Drive spin down can be used to good effect, if your active workload is kept on SSD cache or unassigned devices, the array can be mostly spun down and only spun up when moving data onto the array for near line archive, and when parked for your end of day entertainment.


Yes, temperature is a concern that I might be under-estimating. More considerations ....

Spin down might be a good solution that I need to learn how to control. More homework :)

Thanks!




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How much space are you thinking you will need?

 

I was thinking 4-6 tb at the start and building somewhat over time.

 

I think the real limit will be what size I can get to while still using 2.5” drive to keep the form factor smaller.

 

 

 

 

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3x2tb data plus 1 2tb parity would give you 6tb without needing to go with the newer 4tb 2.5" drives. The newest high capacity drives are more geared to raid arrays than laptops as they are 15mm thick.  The laptop drives have proven that they can stand a beating and maybe the newer thicker ones are as good. 

 

How many of us have left our laptops laying in the passenger seat on a hot day.  Check out this melted dashboard

 

https://www.carsguide.com.au/car-news/queensland-heat-melts-car-dashboard-39711

 

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  • 2 weeks later...

Hi...

 

I run a 20 TB system and have been for going into 5 years on the road with it.  I run all standard platter drives in the system and use SSD just for the Cache.  Right now it has a 8TB parity and five 4 TB drives. (I put in the larger parity when I needed a new drive, so I did that for expansion if needed.) 

 

It is just part of our routine to shut the server down when we move and turn it back on when we arrive and setup.  Same with our Dish Hooper, we always unplug it while traveling.  It just becomes routine to do it like anything else you need to do.

 

As far as heat goes, I have it in it's own cabinet and just have one 3" fan pulling air out of the top of it.  It does very well and I leave the drives spun up even though I really do not need to. The issue I found, with my system, is that if I am watching something off the server and then a new file needed to be written and it needs to spin up a drive, the show then buffers while that I/O is waiting. So I now down don't spin them down. 

 

The big thing in the coach however is the full Ubnt UniFi Wi-Fi system that is running with dual band AP's inside and out and three switches. :)

 

In the park we are currently at, I designed the Wi-Fi in the park.There is 150Mbps coming into the park, here is the data path I need to take....

 

Me ---> Wi-Fi --> NanoStation 5AC Station ---> LightBeam 5AC120 AP ---> LightBeam 5AC Gen to Station ---> Lightbeam 5AC Gen2 AP ---> Ethernet to router via 3 switches.  105Mbps down. :) 

 

...however, I can get 105Mbps into the coach. :)  Looking at the network traffic when I did that, 35Mbps was being used by others. :)

 

https://OutsideOurBubble.com 

 

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Edited by David Bott
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BTW...Yes, I just realized you said truck or SUV and not motorhome or RV.  So being small is really the only way to go and SSD would be really the way to go because you mentioned Dash Cam and thus a small platter drive is still open to going BANG on a bump.  For the DashCam I would stick to SD in the cam, 128gig can get you days of 1080P.  But also, seeing you mention you will then be off loading this data back home. As such, not knowing how long we are talking, I don't see the need at all for running a server for this type of need. You can then in that case just get away with single SSD drive as even 1TB can hold A LOT.  I shoot and edit in 4K and get hours and hours of footage.  Heck, even my 4K camera using an SD card can hold a good amount of time.  :)

 

Sorry I missed it and talked about the setup in a motor coach. 

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  • 7 months later...
On 3/15/2018 at 7:33 PM, David Bott said:

BTW...Yes, I just realized you said truck or SUV and not motorhome or RV.  So being small is really the only way to go and SSD would be really the way to go because you mentioned Dash Cam and thus a small platter drive is still open to going BANG on a bump.  For the DashCam I would stick to SD in the cam, 128gig can get you days of 1080P.  But also, seeing you mention you will then be off loading this data back home. As such, not knowing how long we are talking, I don't see the need at all for running a server for this type of need. You can then in that case just get away with single SSD drive as even 1TB can hold A LOT.  I shoot and edit in 4K and get hours and hours of footage.  Heck, even my 4K camera using an SD card can hold a good amount of time.  :)

 

Sorry I missed it and talked about the setup in a motor coach. 

All good - I've been off this forum for so long but I really appreciate your reply. I'm still working on this and your setup is really interesting.

 

I'll keep plugging away at it but I may hit you up in the coming weeks/months. I suspect we are in pretty similar space.

 

You can look up our overland vehicle and project on Instagram at @Wandering_Bison 

 

Cheers!

 

 

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