NAS and surveillance advice

Thanks for the detailed reply. I was looking to do the same with regards to only starting with 3 hard drives (WD red 4TB drives look best bang for buck at the moment). I am not sure I can be bothered to go down the shucking route and hope I get lucky with a good drive. The reason I was interested in the 1520+ over the 920+ was so I could swap to SHR2 in the future when I start putting bigger drives in the system without losing so much available storage.

Hmm, I no longer have a UPS so that'll be another cost if I go down that route. Maybe I could add the NVME drives at a later date once funds allow for a UPS. I will be using the system for surveillance too so I am not sure if having the SSD for write cache would be a good thing in that respect.

With regards to the 1Gb ethernet issue, that did put me off until I watched a linus video where he uses link aggregation to increase to 4Gb ethernet. I would need a switch that could support this though so again, another cost if the 1Gb ethernet becomes a problem for me in the future.
 
This has arrived today! :O :D

What are your thoughts on file systems to use with the DS1520+? I am going to use it for data storage and surveillance station. Should I setup two partitions, BTRFS for my file storage, EXT4 for the surveillance recordings?
 
Sorry missed your earlier posts so will reply to all of them now :)

fobose said:
I ended up buying a DS1520+ earlier this evening with 3x 8TB WD gold drives. Excited :D
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Very nice :)

fobose said:
TWhat are your thoughts on file systems to use with the DS1520+? I am going to use it for data storage and surveillance station. Should I setup two partitions, BTRFS for my file storage, EXT4 for the surveillance recordings?
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Personally I'd create a single BTRFS volume, but then create a dedicated CCTV Share - fairly sure you can turn off the advanced features (checksumming/copy on write) for specific shares, so e.g. the CCTV wouldn't need those.

fobose said:
Hmm, I no longer have a UPS so that'll be another cost if I go down that route. Maybe I could add the NVME drives at a later date once funds allow for a UPS. I will be using the system for surveillance too so I am not sure if having the SSD for write cache would be a good thing in that respect.
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CCTV is mostly sequential writes, which won't benefit from NVMe acceleration

fobose said:
With regards to the 1Gb ethernet issue, that did put me off until I watched a linus video where he uses link aggregation to increase to 4Gb ethernet. I would need a switch that could support this though so again, another cost if the 1Gb ethernet becomes a problem for me in the future.
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In most cases aggregating 4x1Gb will not give you 4Gb transfer speed, but does allow 4 machines to each get 1Gb performance at the same time.

SMB Multichannel (introduced with Windows 8 and newer) should in theory allow a single machine to utilise all 4 connections to approach the 4Gb transfer speed, but from what I've read, the Synology implementation is still very much a "beta" feature still not ready for "production" use
 
Armageus said:
Personally I'd create a single BTRFS volume, but then create a dedicated CCTV Share - fairly sure you can turn off the advanced features (checksumming/copy on write) for specific shares, so e.g. the CCTV wouldn't need those.
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Excellent, thanks for the quick response! I have now done this and you are right, you can turn off the advance features which I have now done this on the recording folder.

Armageus said:
In most cases aggregating 4x1Gb will not give you 4Gb transfer speed, but does allow 4 machines to each get 1Gb performance at the same time.
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Oh, I obviously didn't look in to that enough. It still sounds a lot better than only 1Gb port if I experience any bottle necks in the future.

WJA96 said:
You shouldn’t need to touch anything in the menus apart from the Time, IP address, Smart Plan and IVS menus. Most other options are already optimum. Once you get your storage, then we can talk streaming resolutions, frame and bit rates.
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@WJA96, are you able to advise on streaming resolutions etc as you mention above now that I have my recording system?
 
@WJA96 are you able to help with regards to the frame and bit rates for my 5MP cameras (and the 1x 2MP one I bought from you)? Is it also best to run at the maximum FPS possible?

I have currently set the iframe interval to match the FPS (20 on the 3x 5MP camera's, 25 on the 2MP). The bitrate option says 'maximum' bitrate. Is this variable depending on what is happening on the camera (lots of movement = increased bitrate)?
 
You have options on the bit rates and personally I’d only run at 15fps because that gives smooth-enough motion when you’re recording 24/7. If you have hard disk capacity to burn then sure, run them at 25fps or 30fps because every extra frame captured is one where you might get that ‘perfect’ still image of the intruder. But it literally doubles your recording space to go from 15fps to 30fps.

On bit rate, on the Wiz Sense cameras (TiOC) then they have decent CPUs in them so use Variable Bit Rate (VBR). That will give you the optimum image quality. On the 2MP colour night vision, you want something in excess of 2500. Anything above that is basically wasted. But try VBR on that too and so long as you don’t see sparklies or tearing on the recorded images then I’d leave it in VBR.
 
fobose said:
Excellent, thanks for the quick response! I have now done this and you are right, you can turn off the advance features which I have now done this on the recording folder.



Oh, I obviously didn't look in to that enough. It still sounds a lot better than only 1Gb port if I experience any bottle necks in the future.



@WJA96, are you able to advise on streaming resolutions etc as you mention above now that I have my recording system?
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By default you record the main stream and I don’t see why you wouldn’t record at full resolution. The sub-stream is what is used for previews and for that the 720p sub stream is usually fine. Whether you want to record that as well is up to you. Personally, I don’t.
 
@fobose - any reason you went for the Gold over purple WD drives? The purples are optimised to write data rather than read it, which is what almost all other types of hdd are optimised for.
 
WJA96 said:
You have options on the bit rates and personally I’d only run at 15fps because that gives smooth-enough motion when you’re recording 24/7. If you have hard disk capacity to burn then sure, run them at 25fps or 30fps because every extra frame captured is one where you might get that ‘perfect’ still image of the intruder. But it literally doubles your recording space to go from 15fps to 30fps.

On bit rate, on the Wiz Sense cameras (TiOC) then they have decent CPUs in them so use Variable Bit Rate (VBR). That will give you the optimum image quality. On the 2MP colour night vision, you want something in excess of 2500. Anything above that is basically wasted. But try VBR on that too and so long as you don’t see sparklies or tearing on the recorded images then I’d leave it in VBR.
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Thanks for the tip re the FPS. I will put them all at 15 FPS and see how it goes. I would rather not waste lots of storage if I can help it. I have also set to only keep 7 days worth of footage for now.

I have now set all the cameras to VBR. I've been experimenting with the TIOC's maximum bitrate and 5000 seems about the sweet spot for 15FPS. I have set the 2MP to 2750 for now until I can test it.

I am still waiting for my extra 2 camera licenses to come through the post before I can add the other two camera's to synology's surveillance station. The only camera that is supported properly is the 2MP one. I've contacted synology to see if the other 3 Dahua's I have can be added.

WJA96 said:
@fobose - any reason you went for the Gold over purple WD drives? The purples are optimised to write data rather than read it, which is what almost all other types of hdd are optimised for.
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I was looking at the red and purple drives originally, then spotted the higher MTBF and longer warranty on the gold drives so I went for those. If that was the wrong choice then whoops :p
 
Synology are usually very quick to add cameras. After all, they’re charging £50 a licence so you need to get something for that fee. All they’re doing is exposing the additional configuration menus in their own interface. So they ask Dahua for the ROM file from the camera and they convert the menus from that to their config format so often it’s within a couple of days. The TiOCs can just be ONVIF if you need to until the correct config files arrive.

7d seems a really short over-write time on that number of cameras. You’ll probably only use 1Tb per week, so with your 20Tb or so of data even if you stretched that out to 4 or 8 weeks you wouldn’t be pushing any data limits. I’m SIA licenced to extract images from surveillance systems and generally I get asked for images 14-28 days after an event. If you go on holiday for 14 days and you come home to find something has occurred then you need to have recorded at least 14 days of images.

The Gold drives certainly oaren’t the wrong choice. They’re just not the ones made specifically for surveillance. I’m pretty sure WD aren’t going to ask what you were using the drive for if it failed and you wanted to RMA it.
 
I emailed them on Thursday I think so hopefully they will have been added come Monday/Tuesday! The licenses certainly are not cheap but I did know that before I bought the NAS. I think I paid £42 each extra license.

Good point re holidays. I will probably put it up to 28 days and see how much space it uses. Two of my cameras I will only set them to motion detection recording. My storage space is 14.5TB total (using 3 drives in SHR 1), although I've used up a few TB already from existing data.

I ended up going for the DS1520+ as it was going to be used for multiple uses, surveillance was just one of those uses. I am really happy with it so far!
 
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