DIY NAS for CCTV retention

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sfrasernz

227 posts

Master Geek

#251564 1-Jul-2019 17:02

I’m planning to build a NAS for CCTV retention as my 8TB NVR will only retain 3.5 weeks of footage and I’ve been caught short a few times now.

I have 8 x 3TB drives to put into an array with LSI 9921-8i HBA. unRaid seems popular here in the forums but I’ve never used it. I have no requirement for virtualisation- this purely for storage. Hardware requirements for unRaid are lower which seems advantageous. I like the idea of a ssd cache drive for performance but with up to 16 concurrent h264 streams I think I’d need a fairly large SSD to cope. I am of course assuming that a DIY NAS can handle that much data! More likely 8 concurrent streams most of the time.

What NAS platform would you recommend for this application ? And would anyone happen to know of a good case to house 8 3.5” drives?

Dynamic

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#2267883 1-Jul-2019 17:30

Silly question.... should you consider tweaking the motion sensitivity to reduce the recording time?

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#2267884 1-Jul-2019 17:30

8TB in 3.5 weeks, you must have a lot of cameras setup to record in HD.

Perhaps you could tweak down your bitrate / motion sensor / line / area crossing as storing everything is not normally required.

Unraid is super easy to follow your nose. You just need a USB thumb drive to install it onto, then that is what you boot off and the storage is just used for storage. The config and licensing is all stored on the USB drive.

mdf

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#2267887 1-Jul-2019 17:37

+1 for Unraid. I am fairly new to Linux but this is super straightforward. I know you wanted it for NAS only, but it's Docker Community Applications make other stuff super straightforward. Spaceinvader One has some great tutorials on Youtube.

sfrasernz

227 posts

Master Geek

#2267889 1-Jul-2019 17:40

The cameras are used in a retail application so they're a necessity I'm afraid. They are setup in their highest quality but it comes in very handy hen its necessary to zoom and crop. In fact whenever I provide footage to the police or others they're always suprised with the clarity of the images! One thing I could do is tweak the retention on some of the less important cameras but that said I think I still need more recording space.

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#2267910 1-Jul-2019 18:48

Only recommendation I would make is go for the Purple/Red disks rather than Green.
And make sure you have monitoring via email alerts on the array to notify you when / if a disk fails. Perhaps also have a spare on hand if it's really important ready to be hot swapped if required.
I would just find a 8gb USB disk and flash it. The instructions are super easy.
Might also be worth checking out zoneminder as you can get it as a docker image and gives you a whole lot more flexibility in comparison to just regular per camera recording.
Also try rebooting the NAS when the cameras are recording and make sure they recover and keep on recording. As you will want unraid to update patches when they come out.

sfrasernz

227 posts

Master Geek

#2267913 1-Jul-2019 18:59

ZoneMinder looks interesting...I'll stick with the NVR for work but it looks like a tidy solution for home where I'm looking at a couple of cameras.

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#2267917 1-Jul-2019 19:13

You'll need to see if the NVR supports recording to a NAS. Most expect the disks to be built in so format them when you setup. It may support larger disks or it may not.
Hence why zoneminder might be required as either each individual camera records to a dedicated NAS share using the built in recording from the camera or you talk to a NVR.
Hence why you may need zoneminder to do the NVR function if you wanted a multidisk NAS to hold everything.
NVR to Samba share means it's another point of failure if the CCTV -> NVR or NVR -> NAS has issues.

Worth testing and trying to break it before changing anything.

Since aren't you sure you can't just swap the drive in the NVR to something larger and format a new disk??

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sfrasernz

227 posts

Master Geek

#2267946 1-Jul-2019 19:59

It's a Hikvision NVR and documentation says 2 x 4TB disks is the largest disk supported. I haven't tried anything larger because I don't want the expense if it can't utilise the capacity. The NVR does support NAS as a storage device so that should be okay.

Based on the above I'll build a unRaid box using a couple of disks and will see how it goes.