NVR and/or NAS

r3br3l15 · 30 Dec 2017 at 17:25

firstly has anyone used a NAS for the storage of home CCTV recording?

ive currently got a DVR with single hard drive storing CCTV footage,
but i also want to buy a NAS for home storage,

ive been looking at this 1 as i dont have much data on my PC (max 3TB)
https://www.overclockers.co.uk/syno...4-bay-network-attached-storage-hd-0ac-sy.html

am i correct in thinking i could put 3 drives 2TB each in RAID 5 for data and then a single drive for the CCTV footage?

thanks

bledd · 31 Dec 2017 at 08:43

Yes you can.

You can either use the Synology as a storage location for your CCTV, or you can use Synology Surveillance Station (it's a free extra to install on any Synology), providing your camera is supported.

WJA96 · 31 Dec 2017 at 09:16

+1 - just be aware that if you want to use Surveillance Station, Synology devices only come with two or four Surveillance Station licences by default and they are VERY expensive (£50 each, £85 for 2 or £155 for 4) if you need more. You need one licence per camera view, so if you are using 360-degree fisheyes with 90-degree extracts then you need 4 licences per camera. Ouch! On acstandard IP camera, you need one licence per camera.

The unit you linked to comes with 2 licences. You can also just play the video back off the system but Surveillance Station is nice software.

It’s also worth noting that on an otherwise very high spec NAS it only has 2 built-in NICs so your maximum bandwidth is less than 2 x 1GbE if you LAG them. If you are serious about constantly recording video from cameras then that will eat into your bandwidth (although not as much as you’d think), and if you want to separate the cameras from the rest of your network then 2 1GbE NICs could be a limiting factor in the future.

Synology make a specific NVR (216 NVR) with 4 or 9 Surveillance Station licences as standard but it would work out more expensive than what you have linked to (and you need more hard drives obviously) but if you are thinking about backups and so forth, a single unit may not be a good option.

I really like Dahua equipment if you decide to go with a separate NVR although their UK distributors decision to only sell to “trade” customers means it’s really hard to get a price sometimes.

r3br3l15 · 31 Dec 2017 at 10:10

wow thanks for the info, this seems much more involved than i thought,

currently im only looking at 1 camera (to replace the single camera being in use currently) i have no plans for a second IP camera but i at least i will have the spare licence on the NAS available

with regards to the software the original plan was to use an app on my phone to remotely view live and playback footage (which i do with my current camera) so as the software is free i may give that a go and see what other features it offers
ive have looked on the synology software and my camera is listed as supported

can you explain a little more about this bandwidth, my setup currently consists of the POE switch (netgear) and a TP-Link 16 port gigabyte switch which the new NAS will connect, i do have GbE capabilities on the network from the router which my PC uses now
ive had no issue lately with bandwidth however having not had a NAS on the network im not sure how this would be affected

WJA96 · 31 Dec 2017 at 12:47

If you only have 1 camera then I would absolutely go with the Synology solution you initially suggested. I looks to be an excellent NAS.

Bandwidth won’t be an issue in your case.

There are two basic ways of streaming IP video. Just send multiple stills (MJPEG) and various compressed streaming methods of which H.264 is the most popular in my experience. If you just send video to the NAS it will record MJPEG. If you use Surveillance Station it will record H.264 if you leave it on default.

That’s important only because H.264 uses much less bandwidth and drive space than MJPEG. Each MJPEG camera running at 15fps at 720P will use about 9.6Mbps of bandwidth. If you go up to 1080P then you need 20.4Mbps of bandwidth. And that’s constant. Always there, even if you just stream black space it’s always using that much bandwidth. If you switch to H.264 then you only need 1.9Mbps bandwidth for 720P and 4.1Mbps for 1080P. That’s why you should use Surveillance Station if you can. Synology also have a phone app you can use to access your cameras from anywhere you need to.

So, if you had a small factory with 20 cameras then even running H.264 you could tie up a chunk of a 1GbE channel permanently and then if you want to run backups or stream video to a TV or something then only have 2 x 1GbE ports would be a limiting factor pretty quickly. If you just have 1 or 2 cameras then it won’t be an issue. My home system runs 8 cameras on the 9 licence NVR-216 with two 8Gb Iron Wolf drives and it uses about 50Mbps of bandwidth on a 1GbE NIC.

1 720P 15fps camera will use about 1Gb drive space per day. That quite literally doubles if you go to 1080P. That’s on H.264. Go to MJPEG and you need 4 times that. Definitely go with Surveillance Station if you have the option.

r3br3l15 · 31 Dec 2017 at 14:18

thanks for the explanation that makes total sense now, i was thinking of using a 2TB standard 3.5 HDD for the footage which should be plenty of space

my NAS would then be filled with 4x 2TB drives (3x NAS HDD for data and 1x HDD for footage)

thanks for the advice

bledd · 31 Dec 2017 at 21:01

I would just use all 4 drives in raid 5.

https://www.synology.com/en-us/support/RAID_calculator?hdds=

r3br3l15 · 1 Jan 2018 at 11:30

bledd said:
I would just use all 4 drives in raid 5.

https://www.synology.com/en-us/support/RAID_calculator?hdds=

yeh make sense

i presume that way then the footage would be stored across all drives and would be safe if the "single CCTV drive" would fail

bledd · 1 Jan 2018 at 11:37

Yup,

Doesn't matter if it's on more than one drive. You'll get the same amount of space overall, but with more flexibility on where you use it.

r3br3l15 · 23 Feb 2018 at 20:43

hi guys

so im purchased the NAS very pleased with it so far and ive now got it set up (drives installed and connected to network), ive also setup the survielance recording etc (great little app by synology)
my next step was to start a backup to the NAS, i have tried using software called Easeus (which ive used before) but when the location of the destination is required it only shows the single 2TB drive (currently storing CCTV footage)

stupid question time .... i have 3x 2TB drives in raid 5, configured in the NAS as 1 group with total size of 3.6TB. i was under the impression that i would be able to write to this volume (3.6TB) and the data be split across all 3 drives is this correct?
thanks

WJA96 · 26 Feb 2018 at 19:28

r3br3l15 said:
hi guys

so im purchased the NAS very pleased with it so far and ive now got it set up (drives installed and connected to network), ive also setup the survielance recording etc (great little app by synology)
my next step was to start a backup to the NAS, i have tried using software called Easeus (which ive used before) but when the location of the destination is required it only shows the single 2TB drive (currently storing CCTV footage)

stupid question time .... i have 3x 2TB drives in raid 5, configured in the NAS as 1 group with total size of 3.6TB. i was under the impression that i would be able to write to this volume (3.6TB) and the data be split across all 3 drives is this correct?
thanks

RAID 5 uses 1 disk for holding data about the other drives and spreads the data over the remaining drives. So if you have 3 drives, one is used for data integrity and two are used for data. The data is spread across 2 drives, hence the 3.6tb capacity.

r3br3l15 · 26 Feb 2018 at 20:09

thanks for your reply, ive now sorted the issue, it was my own mistake i had simply made a group consisting of the 3 drives but had not created the volume, so i now have the raid 5 volume with 3.48TB of usable space

bledd · 6 Mar 2018 at 06:51

Why not use all 4 in the raid, then set aside 1tb or so for cctv.