Whats the consensus with embedded systems with surveillance software like Synology or Qnap?

BORIStheBLADE

BORIStheBLADE

Getting comfortable
Feb 14, 2016
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North Texas
Looking at all my options from a PC running Blue Iris to a brand name NVR I see a bunch of companies that make small NAS have built in surveillance software. I know you might have to buy camera license but I'm ok with that. Right now Im just curious if anyone has used one for up to a 6-8 camera system.

I see Synology, Qnap have their own sort of surveillance software and Western Digital and Lenovo look to have a embedded version of Milestone Arcus.
I'm looking to see what your experiences have been.

Thanks
 
I had QNAP TS-563, a reasonable NAS, but the quality of its NVR is pretty poor. At least after using it for two years. Playback is really slow, hard to navigate and lack of features as I see in most NVR that discuss in here. The TS-563 came with 4 camera license and I did had Synology and other QNAP, they do come with 2 licenses. I currently have 2 camera 720p only, it does not slow down my normal NAS for file access.

The reason I joining this forum is trying to get a standalone NVR and move my cameras away from my NAS. It lack of flexibility of controlling camera recording. Recently I upgraded the firmware and its Surveillance Station software, the playback software is no longer able to play back its video and its not capturing motion as it was:-( It also cannot play back video over browser (remote or LAN).

I will avoid using NAS for NVR. I have not try using my TS-563's virtual machine to run any NVR software, but theoretically with a good processor, it should work well.
 
mm4games said:
I had QNAP TS-563, a reasonable NAS, but the quality of its NVR is pretty poor. At least after using it for two years. Playback is really slow, hard to navigate and lack of features as I see in most NVR that discuss in here. The TS-563 came with 4 camera license and I did had Synology and other QNAP, they do come with 2 licenses. I currently have 2 camera 720p only, it does not slow down my normal NAS for file access.

The reason I joining this forum is trying to get a standalone NVR and move my cameras away from my NAS. It lack of flexibility of controlling camera recording. Recently I upgraded the firmware and its Surveillance Station software, the playback software is no longer able to play back its video and its not capturing motion as it was:-( It also cannot play back video over browser (remote or LAN).

I will avoid using NAS for NVR. I have not try using my TS-563's virtual machine to run any NVR software, but theoretically with a good processor, it should work well.
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you will not get more flexibility with a standalone nvr...likely less.
For flexibility you want a pc based vms like blue iris or milestone..
 
From what I have read the Synology software is pretty good, buuuut get's expensive after the first two (free) licences.
I went with an NVR as it just works in my home environment, but others champion the BI route as it's a lot more open in what it can do.

Different horse for different courses really. With eight cameras the Synology is going to cost you another $360 on top of the NAS. For that you can get a NAS or if you shop around a BI PC setup.
 
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Another thing to consider is that if your nas ever goes down for whatever reason, you are no longer recording anything.

Also, thats a lot of work your asking the nas to so. I assume you'll have raid on the nas and thats even more work for it and the hard drives to handle. And you'll either have to decide for special nas drives (western digital red fir example) or special security footage drives (western digital purple for example) and in either case, half of the nas functions will have improperly tuned hard drives.

I wanted simple and reliable which is why i went with my Dahua nvr and am very happy with it. Others like to spend a lot of time fine tuning their system and blue iris works well for them.
 
DavidDavid said:
Also, thats a lot of work your asking the nas to so.
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It's not actually - my QNAP NAS boxes that have cameras on Surveillance Station just trickle along with a few % CPU recording the video streams, no encoding / decoding needed, no video content analysis, very little burden on the box. After all - writing / reading to HDDs is what they are very good at.
And that was the case also when I used it on a much older NAS than those I have just now.
DavidDavid said:
And you'll either have to decide for special nas drives (western digital red fir example) or special security footage drives (western digital purple for example) and in either case, half of the nas functions will have improperly tuned hard drives.
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Sorry to disagree - but you should use NAS drives for a NAS.
There are a few aspects that optimise them for use in a NAS RAID array, such as the vibration sensing and handling to avoid the problems of sympathetic vibrations when you have a bunch of discs all spinning in an enclosure. WD Purples do not have that capability.
 
When i had 2 cameras recording on my Qnap nas, i had TERRIBLE performance issues while also using the virtual windows machine on it. Once i completely removed the surveillance station the VM performance improved quite a bit.

While i agree that you should use nas drivers for a nas, i also believe you should use security camera drives for security cameras.
 
Also, to get 6 qnap licenses will cost you $480. Then any time you want to just add one more is gonna cost you $60 each. If you're buying a nas specifically for surveillance, a dedicated nvr or blue iris pc is going to be a much better option.
 
DavidDavid said:
When i had 2 cameras recording on my Qnap nas, i had TERRIBLE performance issues while also using the virtual windows machine on it. Once i completely removed the surveillance station the VM performance improved quite a bit.
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Surveillance Station is a RAM hog - as are VMs, depending on your allocation settings.
I eventually had terrible performance on my old NAS also after various Surveillance Station updates - but not due to lack of CPU, due to lack of RAM, only 256MB. My current NAS has 16GB, so quite comfortable.
I would guess that your NAS got into a thrashing state using swap memory, where performance falls off a cliff.
What did the performance monitor show, and did you see a lot of swap memory in use?

DavidDavid said:
While i agree that you should use nas drivers for a nas, i also believe you should use security camera drives for security cameras.
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Sure - but in a NAS the camera streams are just data, not really a lot different from that from downloading, media serving, transcoding, sync tasks etc.
And remember that something like a NAS drive has a superset of a Surveillance drive's specifications and characteristics, they are not missing any important features.
 
I had upgraded to the max RAM for my machine, 8gigs before doing anything else on it, so no swap memory in use.

And yes it's just data, and lots of it constantly 24/7 which is what the purple drives are fine tuned for. Im not even sure what we're discussing here anymore... We both agree nas needs nas drives, and you wouldn't put a nas drive in a dedicated NVR would you?
 
My opinion through experience using QNAP and Synology my is - their NVR software is not well designed and implemented. I will not spend any $ to add camera license, it just not worth it - cost and quality.
 
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