NVR PC with 4TB HD or NAS?

[mycoma]

Hello is anyone running a NVR PC with a HD for Windows and recording to NAS?

What would be a good NAS to get for recording 4 or 6 3mp cameras?

I have a Dell Optiplex 3020 with 4Gb ram, I5-4570,86W, 500GB hard drive running windows 8
im going to upgrade the HD to a 4TB but eventually I want a Nas.

Still deciding on Blue Iris or Milestone. How much does Milestone Essentials cost?

Thanks

 

[nayr]

you can always build your own nas, http://www.freenas.org/

NAS does not need much CPU/RAM, Mainly IO.. Get a cheap low powered CPU/MBD Combo with a few PCI slots and get a used Intel GigE Server NIC off ebay and a cheap 4 port SATA card or two and stuff it into an old full tower.. you could shove as many drives as you can manage and it should have no problem saturating Gigabit Ethernet..

Install FreeNAS on a small USB stick and 100% of your HDD's will be to network storage... I use freenas in my work lab; its got 32 500GB disks in it and powers a ton of virtual machines spread across a full rack of high end servers... its totally reliable.

I use it at home too; does Time Machine backups for apple computers, Downloads Torrents off Internet and Streams Video to my HTPC/Roku Boxes; among many other things.

 

[networkcameracritic]

BlueIris is $39.99 per PC, Milestone Essential is $48.99 per camera. Sure, there's a software price difference, but there's a price to pay CPU wise with BlueIris so to me it's a wash if it forces you to get a faster PC. I'm sure that the i5 will handle 6 cameras with BlueIris but probably not much more.

You haven't said which cameras with NAS, so hard to say if it will work. People try it with Hikvision but it needs a separate disk partition or disk for each camera, not very efficient and you have to patch the firmware to make it work right. If you are talking Axis or Mobotix, it should work well. But even if you got it working perfectly, it's never going to be as good as having decent NVR software.

For a NAS, you can buy a Synology, very nice and feature rich and comes in various price ranges. I use an HP ProLiant MicroServer NL54, holds 4 drives and you can get it for $300 on sale and run Linus on like CentOS. Still would not do it with cameras.

 

[mycoma]

I will be using hikvision cameras. Is there a way in BlueIris and Milestone to record the video to NAS for storage and will that work with hikvision cameras.

What version of Firmware does not require a patch for Hikvision cameras when they connect directly to NAS?

 

[nayr]

thats what I thought you wanted, to have PC-NVR Software save to NAS; should be doable.. just map the NAS to a local network drive and then configure the NVR software accordingly.. it shouldent care if its local or remote storage.

Both your PC and NAS will surely want good Gigabit adapters; perhaps bonded depending on # of cameras (one is fine for 6 3mp's).

It is upping the complexity to another point of failure; so if you build up or buy a NAS go for quality over quantity.

My Dahua cameras ftp directly to a NAS server; thats all it supports but its a tried and trued protocol and hard to mess up... NFS/iSCSI are alot more complicated to setup and have there own issues... Downside to FTP is I have to cleanup old files on a daily timer to keep the hdd from filling, wont do it automatically.