Before saying anything else I’m not a camera installer or a video security expert and I was trained by Dahua on their equipment as a courtesy because I bought rather a lot of it! Because of my ‘friendly’ relationship with my reseller I only use Dahua cameras. If you want to use something else then much of my experience will be worthless!
I’ve put several systems in for clients using both Synology NVR-216 and Dahua NVRs and the Dahua NVRs are very good indeed, assuming you use Dahua cameras. A good dedicated NVR has features like a wheel for moving the images backwards and forwards and possibly even a PTZ joystick if you have that sort of camera (and a lot of the new very high-res cameras have virtual PTZ so it can be quite useful for that) and if you’re doing clever stuff like linking rapid PTZs to panoramic cameras for face detection then you need to be running DSS and DSS generally runs best on one of Dahua’s own NVRs. And as you would expect, all Dahua cameras are FULLY supported on Dahua NVRs.
A dedicated NVR will also support at least one direct video connection (although so do many NAS boxes) and that could be a factor if you want to review the images regularly.
The Synology NVR-216 is a DS-216 with 4 or 9 Surveillance Station licences included at a good discount over buying them separately. One downside is you only get a single RJ-45 Gigabit port on it so there is no networking redundancy option if you like that sort of thing. The Dahua NVRs allow you to stream a second feed from the second RJ-45 port. If you buy an expensive enough Synology or QNAP NAS with multiple RJ-45s or SFP+ ports I’m sure they would let you do that as well.
I find Synology Surveillance Station straightforward to use but some of the options on the Dahua cameras don’t seem to be fully supported. On the two occasions that I have been asked to give the police access to data from the camera systems both Synology Surveillance Station and Dahuas DSS NVR software made it a piece of cake to locate the time required and copy the files to a USB stick for them to take away. If you are installing a system with a lot of cameras then the Surveillance Station licences do add significantly to the cost of the system with Synology or QNAP. On a 20 Camera QNAP System the Surveillance Station licences are £800. Which is more than an entire Dahua 50 Camera system fitted with 4 x 4Tb HDD. Dahua also make a really nice NVR backup solution that automagically replicates everything across up to 4 NVR backup stations.
Personally, I wouldn’t worry about updates for either type of system as the software is fully stable now and you won’t mess about with it once it’s installed. The only issue would be if you needed to add a new camera and the NAS manufacturer hadn’t updated their Camera list.
And
@bledd - Dahua also do H265+ camera support across the range now. From what I’ve seen, HikVision and Dahua are pretty even on price, features, image and build quality. Even using H264+ I’ve been amazed as how long you can store images for on what seem like very small hard drives.
