Should I leave space on my Camera Server DVR drives?

Question

I have a camera server that has 7 drives for storage (the server is running Win7 Pro). It was set up by someone else several years ago, I only recently took over. 4 of those drives are set to fill 100%, 2 are set to fill to 96% and one is set to fill to 95%. Then there is the main drive which is set to not be used by the recordings and is currently 50% full.

I'm trying to determine if I should lower all drives to keep 5% free? The 4 drives that are at 100% are 12.2TB, the other 3 are 1.8TB.

The software is setup to delete the oldest files when it makes a recording to the full drives so that it is constantly deleting old files and adding new ones as there are some 50 cameras that record motion on a 24/7 schedule.

I've seen where people have recommended that you keep 5-10% free or 1% on Linux, but they always have some kind of caveat based on the exact usage of the drives. These drives are for recording video only, there is nothing else on them. I think that they are in a RAID, but not entirely sure, based on results from this answer (The drive names part in Device Manager > Disk Drives).

So my question is: Is it safe and acceptable to leave these drives at 100% or is it best practice to have everything at least with 5% free?

Dont you use a RAID setup, such mean a lost disk = lost recording ? — yagmoth555, Jan 04 '18 at 00:26
I believe there is a hardware raid, but I didn't set them up. If we lose a drive I don't know what will happen. — Mike, Jan 04 '18 at 18:37
I would check, as in raid setup you cant select a drive itselft, it would be by partition/array — yagmoth555, Jan 05 '18 at 13:51

score 0 · Accepted Answer · answered Jan 10 '18 at 18:43

In the end, it has been determined that I will leave the drives the way they are. They were set up by someone else and we have not had any problems with the server thus far. I have monitors setup on the server to see if something does go bad, that's how I found this, to begin with.

After doing some research I found that this is the way the software is set up to constantly remove the oldest videos before recording new ones, so the drives are usually at 1% not quite 100%.

Should I leave space on my Camera Server DVR drives?

1 Answers1