Howdy all, I’m looking to build a home server / NAS / surveillance station for my home, most likely a 4 bay Synology running some sort of RAID. I will have 3-4 cameras, most likely all 4k Hikvisions (15-20fps, H.265). As well as surveillance, I’ll use it as a media server and for backups plus whatever other fun I feel like.
My HDD questions:
How important are actual surveillance marketed HDDs? Will normal or NAS drives die too quickly?
Is mixing important data with high turnover surveillance data on the same drives a bad idea?
How much footage are we talking here? Are you planning for a 64-88 TB system, or something smaller?
Do keep in mind SSDs are rapidly approaching affordability, seems like 8TB m.2 will reach below $400 (SATA is already there) before end of next year and 16 TB will follow around end of 2026 at the latest. This makes me start thinking you might want to invest in m.2 infrastructure rather than SATA, at this point. Even though capacity is not a good right now.
As for your question though, as long as the HDD isn’t SMR it is probably fine, no need to look for special HDDs.
Me personally I’d keep the 2 systems separate. Nas drives for the media library and surveillance drives for the cameras.
Besides the camera footage … how big is your media library? Do you have it in 1080 or 4k? Do you plan converting it all to 4k? How many users are going to be accessing the data?
The drives have extra software in the firmware of the drives and ar built a bit different than normal drives for 24/7 usage / sitting next together for all that time. At least that’s the way I understand it!.
Also look for the nas device to have multi gigabit connection!
According to Synology’s calculator, I’ll be sitting at 8.1TB for 30 days storage. I don’t feel the need for redundancy on that. I’d probably be aiming 30+ TB storage for non-surveillance data with redundancy.
I like the SSD idea, I’ll have a look but I suspect Australian pricing won’t be so friendly for anything with enough capacity and durability. In terms of longevity, I don’t mind investing in something good now then upgrading in a few years. I always tell myself I’ll sell it when I’m done, but I never do.
Any idea if I can do this within a single system, ideally Synology but alternately FreeNAS/TrueNAS? I’d rather not have 2 systems running, though I have an ancient computer (6600k, ATI 3870) that would gobble up power but get the job done. I think my library is sitting around 5TB, but will flourish when I can abandon stream serfing.
You have to buy licences beyond that which is unpleasant, but they’re once off and transferrable.
Yeah, SSD is becoming viable, but $799 for a Teamgroup MP44 8TB is a bit excessive at this point. That drive will most likely be below $200 before end of 2025, but for now… At 30 TB you could buy an Asustor Flashstor 12 Pro and fill it with 8x4TB m.2 drives, that would land you around $2k USD so say $3k AUD.
The above is complete overkill in your case though, buying a 4-bay NAS with four $200 12TB HDDs is probably your best bet here, that should be around $1.5k USD / $2.2k AUD or so?
At 30TB full flash storage is unfortunately not cost effective enough, it will be, but not just yet.
For what little it may be worth, I strongly recommend against consumer nand flash for write-centric workloads, even those that don’t actually have a great deal of overall drive writes over the expected drive life. The cheaper consumer drives magnify write wear much more significantly when approaching capacity, to the point that it’s way beyond what you might expect.
Using a dramless SATA SSD as a recording drive for OBS(<20Mbps, so not exactly a lot of writes, and infrequent use), I managed to grow a few bad sectors just from writing some temp data to it when it was nearly full.
If the drive doesn’t have some sort of cache, be it HMB or Dram, it’s best to assume that it’s A: basically WORM storage and B: you only really get about 90% capacity out of it if you want it to live, or alternatively, that you actually get about half the capacity you see if you want it to last.
This isn’t a defect, it’s by design, and the design is simple product segmentation. It’s expensive to be poor.
A half-used enterprise drive with similar elsewise specs could probably last about as long as a brand new consumer drive, but it varies brand to brand a lot. Other good drives to consider are the Samsung 8XX series SATA drives or similar generation SSDs, as they contain early-generation 3D nand, often in 2bit per cell mode, with a dram cache to extend use life.
Also of note, SATA drives or external drives, including enclosures, do not support HMB afaik. Only internal NVME drives. I believe most internal NVME drives without cache do support it, though, but it’s best to double-check the specific drive.
Suppose so! Setup your nas drives in a raid or zpool and name it something like media library and then do the same for the surveillance drives and name it accordingly! If done 1 at a time I.E. insert all the nas drive and create the raid / zpool then the other set.
Unless we buy Synology cameras, then each has its own license. But if you plans a different brand of cameras and 4 pieces, would have to buy two additional licenses.
It looks worse if you have 20-40 cameras of a different brand, it starts to accumulate a bit…
I played around with the demo version of Synology Surveillance Station and it’s quite enjoyable. Personally, I’m a bit tired of DIY for monitoring systems… SSS reduces this discomfort, so if $ doesn’t limit you, it’s definitely an interesting option.