ZFS good for local IP Camera Surveillance system?

[Sawtaytoes]

I’m looking at moving to an IP Camera Surveillance system for my house that stores videos on my TrueNAS SCALE NAS running ZFS.

I have 9 cameras right now and would love to add more, but I’ve been waiting.

1. Is ZFS good for this purpose?
2. Anything I need to keep in mind?
3. Are there any good pieces of software I can use?
4. Are there any doorbell IP cameras?
5. Is there a good place to see the storage amount to how much video data I wanna store?

Background

Nest

I currently have a Nest camera system and don’t like the idea of these folks spying on me. Honestly, I wanna get out of the Nest ecosystem completely (I bought all their stuff year ago). Cameras are my first step to Nest independence.

UniFi Protect

I’ve been wanting to switch to UniFi Protect for some time now because they have the doorbell and had affordable cameras.

Problem is their system is 100% proprietary which is a huge waste of money. They also take way too long to release products and have jacked up their prices. It’s put a bad taste in my mouth, so I don’t wanna focus on UniFi if I can avoid it.

I have all-UniFi networking gear, but I think using UniFi here is a bad long-term deal considering I’m already trying to get away from Nest.

Synology Surveillance Station

The only thing that attracted me to Synology’s solution is they allow for off-the-shelf IP cameras.

Although, I decided again using it because I’d have to buy another rackmount NAS, and I already paid a bunch of money for two self-built Stoinator XL60 chassis (one is a JBOD). I already have ZFS, so I’d love to just buy some drives, setup a new zpool, and throw some videos in there.

IP Camera software

I was looking at Frigate. Looks like it has all the features I want and allows me to know if a human is at a certain location. It has a phone app too as well as a TrueCharts container.

Options (and issues)

I’m pretty sure I need hardware video acceleration for an app like Frigate.

My NAS is an Epyc 7252p, and I’m pretty sure it has no hardware video acceleration. I could add a GPU, but 5 of the 7 PCIe slots are populated and a 6th slot is has nothing in it, but the slot itself is in use. It’s this server is packed.

Raspberry Pi

I heard the Raspberry Pi has hardware video acceleration. Is this true? Or would I have to hook up a GPU to one? If I hooked up a GPU to a Raspberry Pi and put it in a server, would it be capable of managing 9 cameras?

Building another server

I have another Epyc 7252p which I was unable to return.

I could build another rig with only a boot drive, put a GPU in there, and have it store all these files on the NAS.

This could be a lot of Ethernet traffic though. Would it be fine? I have 2x10Gb LAGG on my NAS.

Using the existing JBOD.

Since I already have External miniSAS going into the JBOD, I could put the surveillance hard drives on one of the SAS expanders and avoid having to buy another NAS-chassis.

This would also completely eliminate the double network traffic (Camera → video server → NAS) and all traffic now goes over miniSAS.

One issue is if I restart the JBOD. Now I’d have to also turn off the NAS and video surveillance system. That part sucks :(.

Concerns

1. I wanna make sure, whatever system I use, I can keep the cameras’ firmware up-to-date.
2. I don’t want this app to ever stop working. I don’t like the idea of it being tied to my NAS’s existence because a simple restart can kill all my video feeds.
3. I wanna make sure I can use a phone app or browser because I have 3 kids and use the cameras to see what happened when they’re being rough.
4. I will 100% avoid any Chinese products. If the company is Chinese they’re 100% gonna be spying on me and can’t be sued. It’s not even an “if” situation.

[ucav117]

Frigate uses Coral TPU’s. They are like $30 and slot into an M.2 or Mini-PCI interface depending on the model. That is the route I am currently going. It is significantly more efficient than using GPU acceleration and cheaper.

ZFS is perfectly fine, it is a little overkill for NVR duty but since you are already running a TruNAS system just stick with it.

I have professionally deployed Synology Surveillance Station several times. I really like it and “just works”. If you don’t care about the advanced features on their higher end models you can just get a DS118+ or DS220+ and use it solely as an NVR. Then you have a dedicated hardware device that is handling your security system.

[Sawtaytoes]

1. How is ZFS overkill for a NAS?
2. If I use Synology’s system, how would I put this accelerator card in it? Does it have slots?
3. How much RAM would I need for this?

RAM

Just realized an issue with building a separate server. I have to not only buy a motherboard, but also RAM. I already have 256GB of RAM in this thing, so I’d like to use it .

Coral TPU

If Coral is 1-slot, I have an idea on how to fit it. I have eight Optane drives for ZFS metadata on my main zpool. Four of them are connected to an NVMe PCIe bifurcation card.

I have 24 SSD mirrors, so I can get away with zero Optane drives, but I’d at least like to keep 4. If I remove that card, I can easily slot in an AI accelerator card.

Storinator PSUs aren’t designed for GPUs pulling hundreds of watts, so something that uses only PCIe-slot power should be safe.

NVMe

I looked up the Coral TPUs, and there’s one PCIe model, one Raspberry-Pi-style SoC, and some NVMe models.

Maybe I could use my existing NVMe PCIe bifurcation card and put in a few of these modules? How many would I need?

Downtime

Another issue is if I restart my NAS, it will kill the video system.

Example: Anytime I add drives to my NAS, I’m supposed to just plug them in, but that often causes issues and requires I restart the NAS.

It’s possibly because those SSDs are SATA and not SAS, but sometimes other drives go offline and the zpool becomes unreadable.

I’d like my video surveillance system to stay up while that’s happening if possible, so I’m considering my options. For now, I really don’t wanna buy another system if I don’t have to.

[ucav117]

@Sawtaytoes

If I use Synology’s system, how would I put this accelerator card in it? Does it have slots?

You don’t need the coral. You would be using Synology’s native Surveillance Station software. You can use frigate and a coral TPU if you want but you need to make sure you get a Synology that has an M.2 slot.

@Sawtaytoes

How much RAM would I need for this?

Not much, like 16GB would be more than enough.

@Sawtaytoes

How is ZFS overkill for a NAS?

It is overkill for a NVR. Usually surveillance systems have just one-two HDD.

[Sawtaytoes]

Is there a reason you’d prefer one of the solutions over the other?

1. UniFi
2. Synology
3. Frigate

I like Frigate because I can use my existing system.

With Synology and UniFi, I’d have to buy something separate.

And with UniFi, I’m 100% stuck in their ecosystem.

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And is it beneficial to have the surveillance system on a different rig altogether? Or is it fine leaving it on the NAS since it’s turned on most of the year?

I’m asking because most videos are using a Home Assistant server. I’d like to eventually get into that, but I’d like to do as much on my NAS as possible.

[ucav117]

I chose frigate because, like you mentioned, it uses existing hardware + a $30 coral TPU and integrates with HA.

The only two advantages to Synology are ease of use and dedicated hardware.

I would stay away from the UniFi surveillance system due to the proprietary camera situation. I do like their access control system and have installed it several times.

[kewiha]

Watch TheHookUp’s videos for info on Frigate, security cameras, how home assistant can be used as a front end (e.g. for your phone) with frigate, etc. Even if the videos aren’t about specific NVR products you’re considering, the context and rationale behind the choices can inform your decisions.

NVRs and cameras can be overwhelming because of the number of options and how each choice limits you. You may find it helpful to establish what you want your NVR system to do for you first, then look at what software and hardware combo can do that for you. For example:

• What are you trying to record with your cameras? What would you like to be able to monitor with your cameras? Are those different things? Are there simplifications to your requirements that you can make based on these answers?
• Does it matter if your cameras are down when you’re doing server maintenance? It may not, especially if your main concern is monitoring things that you can monitor ok for short periods when you’re home. If you experience server downtime a lot, consider fixing that rather than having your security system work around it.
• Are you ok if the cameras stop working if the power goes out? If not, getting backup power for your camera, the network switches they connect to, maybe your router, and the NVR server is needed. The power consumption of the NVR server would also become important.
• Do you need/want motion/object detection and/or notifications based on detection events? Does the difference between motion and object detection matter for your use case?
  • Motion/object detection on the NVR requires video decoding. You can use the CPU for that instead of a GPU, but the CPU usage might be more than you want if you have many cameras.
  • Some cameras support hardware-based motion/object detection. This is less flexible than having the NVR do it and limits your camera choices, but makes your NVR choices more flexible.
  • Corals may be needed for object detection on the NVR, but may not be needed for simple motion detection.
    • If you need a coral, the PCIe ones may require proprietary drivers that could be a nuisance to get on TrueNAS. The USB corals may be a better bet if you’re out of PCIE slots.
• How much storage space do you have to budget for this? If you can spare a few hundred GB of space on SATA SSDs (or faster), you probably don’t have to consider storage space any further.
  • If you can’t spare that space, you may need to measure the average video bitrate of your cameras over the course of a typical day to get a reliable storage space estimate (e.g. record continuously for a day from each camera, and see what the file size is). It depends on the camera and what it’s pointed at, so it’s probably a better use of your time to buy a couple big SSDs for NVR duty rather than minimizing storage use.

If you start with requirements and have a good rationale for your non-negotiable requirements, then evaluating solutions becomes more straightforward. If you don’t have this before you start looking at solutions, you can easily wind up specifying a fort knox level security system when a simpler solution would be ok.

Some things you can probably ignore for now:

• Network and storage bandwidth: Cameras are probably transmitting at most 20 Mbit/s each at peak. You’re way more likely to run into problems with non-NVR traffic hogging all the bandwidth rather than the NVR being the bandwidth hog.
• Proprietary NVR platforms. Based on your posts, it seems like you don’t want to be beholden to a company for your infrastructure, and you don’t need them to hold your hand anyway.
• RPIs: You might be able to meet your needs with one, but unless very low power consumption is important to you, normal x86 hardware is probably a better starting point until you know how low your hardware requirements are with confidence.
• Buying more disk arrays/shelves and other large storage upgrades: If you can’t fit your NVR storage needs into a few hundred GB of SSD space, you might be doing something unusual and should reflect on whether your use case is actually that unusual. A pair of big SATA SSDs with high write endurance in a ZFS mirror should be plenty and affordable.
• Whether ZFS is suitable for an NVR: If the drives you’re using are suitable for continuous recording (e.g. NVR HDDs or SSDs with high write endurance), the answer is very likely “yes”.

[Sawtaytoes]

Thanks for your response!

What are you trying to record with your cameras?

24/7 footage of the inside and outside of my house.

It’s useful to have cameras inside for when my kids get into things or get hurt because I need to know what happened.

I currently have 9 cameras, and I’ll probably still have 9 after switching over to a self-hosted solution.

Does it matter if your cameras are down when you’re doing server maintenance?

I don’t want my cameras going down because I wanted to restart my NAS or do some maintenance.

At this point, I’m going to build a completely separate surveillance server with its own drives.

The power consumption of the NVR server would also become important.

Power-wise, I prefer one beefy server running period. How much processing can a Raspberry Pi 4 do?

If I use an x86 server CPU, I have another 16-core Eypc lying around which I got for free (long story). I wouldn’t need ECC for this system either which means all I’d need to buy is a motherboard.

Do you need/want motion/object detection and/or notifications based on detection events? Does the difference between motion and object detection matter for your use case?

Yes, I’d like all kinds of motion detection and notifications when something occurs. I want this to be like my current Nest cameras or UniFi’s Protect system. This is gonna cost a lot, so I don’t want it to be a downgrade.

You can use the CPU for that instead of a GPU, but the CPU usage might be more than you want if you have many cameras.

From using Plex, I think it’s best to get a dedicated GPU for video processing rather than relying on an Epyc to do it in software.

I just need to know which GPU to get. AMD or NVIDIA Quattro? Which models are good?

If you need a Coral, the PCIe ones may require proprietary drivers that could be a nuisance to get on TrueNAS. The USB corals may be a better bet if you’re out of PCIE slots.

Proprietary drivers suck, but by building a separate server, I could install whatever OS I want.

I prefer TrueNAS because it works like an appliance, but I can use anything. There’s no real ZFS requirement unless it’s good for these video recordings.

Curious, how many devices can a USB one process if I ran this on a Raspberry Pi or something else?

How much storage space do you have to budget for this? If you can spare a few hundred GB of space on SATA SSDs (or faster), you probably don’t have to consider storage space any further.

I have hundreds of SSDs and HDDs; although, most are in use in my NASs. I’d rather not add a bunch of writes to my SSDs though as that’ll kill 'em fast. I don’t know what you consider “big”, but I have 4 x 2TB SSDs not in use at the moment. Still, I don’t wanna kill them either.

I’ve bulk-purchased used 10TB HGST (Western Digital) drives and have had really good luck with a certain seller. I can buy in bulk and get a discount; although, I don’t want to buy more than 10 for this server if I can avoid it.

Network and storage bandwidth. You’re way more likely to run into problems with non-NVR traffic hogging all the bandwidth rather than the NVR being the bandwidth hog.

I have a 10Gb switch and 10Gb Ethernet adapters available, so I should be fine there.

Proprietary NVR platforms. Based on your posts, it seems like you don’t want to be beholden to a company for your infrastructure, and you don’t need them to hold your hand anyway.

Correct. I want my own self-hosted solution if possible. Ideally, something where I can access the video remotely without having to setup a VPN (so my wife can use it).

UniFi Protect checks a lot of my “needs” boxes, but the proprietary nature of the whole thing has me skeptical.

If you can’t fit your NVR storage needs into a few hundred GB of SSD space, you might be doing something unusual and should reflect on whether your use case is actually that unusual. A pair of big SATA SSDs with high write endurance in a ZFS mirror should be plenty and affordable.

I don’t understand. I thought I’d be storing terabytes of video data over time.

I don’t need these recordings indefinitely, but I thought 60 days is a good amount (that’s what I get today with Nest). If I could recompress the footage, I could store it even longer!

Whether ZFS is suitable for an NVR: If the drives you’re using are suitable for continuous recording (e.g. NVR HDDs or SSDs with high write endurance), the answer is very likely “yes”.

What are “high-write endurance” SSD? Are you talking about drives like the Micron 5300 PRO 7.68TB models? The only other drives I know are the Kioxia ones, but I don’t have a good grasp on them.

And what about datacenter HDDs like the HGST Helium ones? Are they good for this kinda stuff?

[Exard3k]

@Sawtaytoes

What are “high-write endurance” SSD? Are you talking about drives like the Micron 5300 PRO 7.68TB models?

When talking Micron, “Pro” is the read-intensive product line. “Max” is for mixed-use (aka more writes).

Generally there are 1DWPD and 3DWPD and these are universal metrics used by all vendors. DWPD= full drive writes per day.

high write endurance usually refers to the 3DWPD drives.

But 1DWPD is still 8TB of writes on a 8TB drive, every day for 5 years… That’s a lot

[kewiha]

I would caution against inside cameras with any NVR system that isn’t fully offline and airgapped if you and your family’s privacy is a greater priority than surveillance. I’ll leave it to you to weigh the benefits vs risks of not doing so. Airgapping does reduce your ability to piggyback on your existing servers/network and deliver notifications to you.

If you’re using Frigate or equivalent with object detection configured (and working), it will only be recording when it detects something in the regions you define for each camera. This significantly reduces the storage capacity requirements compared to a 24/7 continuous recording approach. I’ve heard estimates on the order of 1-2GB/hr per camera on average when object detection is configured.

It’s also worth considering that IP cameras may support multiple resolutions. You may not need high resolution recording from all cams, so you could save space by dropping the resolution on those cams.

Enterprise and high end consumer SSDs are rated in drive writes per day, while 9 cams at 2GB/hr each is 432GB/day. The Micron 5300 Pro 7.68TB seems to be rated for ~1 DPWD (i.e. 7.68TB/day) which is 20x what I’d ballpark you’d be writing per day with 9 cams. It’s overkill but if you have some, a pair of those in a ZFS mirror should work great. If you already have a big SSD pool in the same PC with space to spare, then you could use that rather than buying dedicated SSDs for the task.

Some HDDs may wear out faster than expected if you use them for NVRs (something about continuous writing without breaks can upset them if the firmware isn’t built to deal with it). That could just be WD F.U.D. to sell purple HDDs though…

For capacity, the same 1-2GB/hr/camera rule of thumb applies. Keep in mind that if you’ve got a bunch of NAS storage accessible you could have say 2TB formatted space on SSDs in the NVR then shuffle the older recordings to a NAS with HDDs nightly. If you went with a pair of 7.68 TB drives (overkill), you should probably aim to keep them <60% full if you can so their performance is consistent and data fragmentation in your filesystem doesn’t become an issue. If you do, they would fit ~2 weeks happily. To store clips for longer, move the old recordings to HDDs (local or NAS) nightly.

60 days is a pretty long retention period for home if you aren’t away from home for a long period. 2 weeks seems more typical, but that doesn’t mean it works for everyone. Consider using the longest you’re likely to be away from home, then add some buffer. For example, if you aren’t away from home more than 2 weeks at a time, then when would you need to go back more than ~3 weeks? If you set up remote access to your cams, you can always check in periodically if you’re ever away for way longer than you planned.

Intel 6th gen or newer integrated GPUs and Nvidia GPUs seem to be well supported in Frigate, and can now even do a AI detection well without a Coral. Some inexpensive examples include the i5-6500, Tesla P4, Quadro P620.

9 cams might be pushing it for an RPI. If you have an x86 machine with a supported intel integrated GPU or supported Nvidia GPU, I suggest hooking up a single camera, a big SSD, and just playing with frigate and home-assistant. Start small and cheap, then scale up to a long-term solution once you know if you even like the software.

[Exard3k]

@kewiha

continuous writing without breaks can upset them if the firmware isn’t built to deal with it

There is no such thing in ZFS. And if the frequency of TXGs is too much, just adjust txg_timeout to the value you want. Writing in bursts every 3 minutes is totally possible with enough memory. With ZFS, you got options. I personally don’t bother my drives with anything <5GB (or 4min) chunks. All the logs from all the VMs would drive me crazy.

@kewiha

and data fragmentation in your filesystem doesn’t become an issue

sequential large writes hardly fragment the pool. Unless Frigate is modifying the files all the time. Large stuff only really fragments >85% cap in which case you need more disks anyway.

ZFS is very drive-friendly on drive endurance (SSDs) and minimizing mechanical stress (HDD).

[kewiha]

Good points. I don’t know if Frigate insists on sync writes but if you have a UPS or stable power you could force async writes and that alone should be ok for fussy HDDs.

RE: fragmentation, my thinking is that if you have the footage offloaded or deleted periodically, you could approach or cruise at >85% capacity depending how the offloading/deletion is set up. That setup would need to directly or indirectly ensure that adequate free space remains available between periodic dumps.

[skunkworks]

Just throwing in my 2 cents… We are using shinobi/centos vm on a proxmox server - with ZFS… We record 24/7 and it seems to work ok… (we pretty much set it up and forgot about it.)

sam

[Sawtaytoes]

Thanks for your responses!

I’m sold on building another rig for this and doing it myself.

Things I need:

1. A few 8TB high-write-endurance SSDs.
2. Coral AI Processor.
3. A dedicated video encoding card.
4. Chassis, mobo, CPU, RAM, PSU.
5. Cameras.

8TB SSDs

I like SSDs, and these seem good enough for the task at hand. They’re also much lower power than HDDs which is now an issue now that I’ve built a large HDD zpool.

Only recording movement

While I’m a bit skeptical of only storing movement. That’s a great way to lose out on footage if the AI isn’t good enough at figuring it out. But space-wise, it makes a lot of sense and means I could have many fewer SSDs in this build!

Rolling videos over to HDDs

Like you said, I can roll those videos over to my new HDD zpool with 332.04 TiB of capacity and set a quota for 60 TiB of video backups.

That’s a fantastic idea! It leaves my NAS alone for the most part, and I can set those videos to automatically rollover with a custom cron job (unless ZFS has a native way of removing datasets over time). I could hack it with snapshots if I really wanted to.

Also curious how Frigate works with it. Does it know how to look at multiple locations for stored video data?

RAM is helpful?

Did you say that with enough RAM, I can limit how much data hits the SSDs at any given time? How do I do that?

AI Processing

So I need to buy some sort Coral hardware for this build, and even a USB one would be good? Or would I need to get something a bit more capable for 9 cameras?

It’s also possible I’ll buy 2-3 more cameras once I get this setup.

Video Encoding

I need to use some sort of GPU though.

I’d like to get something designed to run in a server like a Quattro or that AMD media accelerator (AMD Announces Alveo MA35D Media Accelerator: AV1 Video Encode at 1W Per Stream).

CPU, mobo, RAM, and the rest

I have a spare Epyc 7313p and Epyc 7252p doing nothing (long story). Still, I’d prefer something that uses a lot less power such as a Raspberry Pi 5. All I’d need is a PCIe adapter for an LSI controller to connect two SAS drives.

If I buy a motherboard and some RAM, I could have something fairly capable.

Are 10Gb NICs fast enough? I’d assume even 1Gb is probably fast enough considering how little data my Nest cameras used back when I only had a 100Mb connection.

I’m thinking this server only needs enough RAM for the OS and the docker container (about 8-16GB). It’s not like I’m needing a RAM cache or anything since I’m loading data from SSDs.

Chassis

I just got done redoing my NAS and ended up buying 3 x 24-SAS-drive Supermicro rackmount JBOD chassies (low-profile) which I didn’t use. They come with redundant PSUs.

I can use one for this purpose and put 2 Micron 5300 or Kioxia equivalent 8TB SSDs in there depending on my needs.

OS

Which OS should I use for Frigate? Is there a Frigate-specific appliance-style OS I should be using or is this a situation where it’s best to use TrueNAS + a docker image?

Cameras

Probably the most important piece is finding good cameras for my use case.

Do you know where I can find those?

Preferrably ones with PoE.

I’m not even sure where to look. I’d prefer to avoid no-name branded Chinese ones.

[Shadowbane]

@Sawtaytoes you might want to look at camera’s manufactured by Synology. I think Wendel did a review of Synology camera’s, it also could have been someone else.

[ucav117]

Since he is rolling his own Synology cameras would be a large price increase for no reason.

I would recommend reolink. They have some killer features at extremely competitive prices. Amcrest is a close second. If you use WiFi cameras I would stick with reolink.

[NicKF]

I managed IT infrastructure for a large-ish public organization. I managed 40 sites. I handled this problem with a VMWare host on Dell R630s with write-intensive SSD for “Live Drive” in Milestone. I had my archival window set to 8 hours.

I also needed to hold at least 30 days locally. I recycled an old Lefthand SAN and installed TrueNAS on a good chunk of old Gen7 HP servers and then mounted it with iSCSI on the windows box Milestone lived in.

These had single socket reallly crappy lowend Westmere era CPUs and 96GB of DDR3. In a single 12-disk RAIDZ2 1080p on upwards of 200 cameras at a few big sites and it handled it just fine. 4k was a bit more intensive for the disks, so some sites had two Z1 vdevs instead, coupled with in-camera compression/Milestone drivers it worked out well enough.

I don’t recommend Milestone, it’s really a kluge of things whipped together over years and its buggy as hell at scale. Good luck, happy to assist if you need anything.

For the amount of cameras you have, any modern-ish GPU from NVIDIA or even AMD (video encode/decode is generally not as good) should handle plenty of streams. A Quadro P1000 would probably be my recommendation. You can use this as a gneral guide: nVidia Hardware Transcoding Calculator for Plex Estimates (elpamsoft.com)

For the AI stuff, not much experience there. Software I used was a sorta mom-and-pop that was forced down my throat. I was able to get about 9 cameras on a Quadro P4000 IIRC but never went into prod or scaled out.

The CPU you have is way overkill. Build a hypervisor like Proxmox or TrueNAS SCALE even so you can spin up some other VMs along with the main one for video surveillance. I’ve had some really good luck with this methodology and using Blue Iris as a front end.

Limiting RAM that low for the CPUs you have seems like a missed opportunity to me. Not only for ARC *which can be helpful in an investigation, but for the ability to run other services locally. DNS, DHCP, NTP, AD, all that good jazz of critical services.

The bitrate and resolution of your camera streams really is what should dictate throughput requirements. Network AND disk side and then double it so you know you’re always in spec and can grow. Realistically, you don’t need much speed and a pair of hard drives mirrored would be fine.

Bandwidth calculator | CCTV Calculator‹

[Sawtaytoes]

Glad to see that even a pair of HDDs can work. I even tried this with slightly higher-quality video at 60fps, and it was very reasonable.

Blue Iris

What is Blue Iris? Does Frigate not have a UI I could use or are you saying Blue Iris is a competing system?

Dedicated video surveillance system

I really only want want this system for video processing. I would prefer if it was extremely low power. If I could use a Raspberry Pi 4 or 5, I would.

I have beefy hardware already

I already have a NAS with TrueNAS SCALE that’s pretty beefy with 256GB of RAM and an Epyc 7313p and has 125 SSDs and 60 HDDs along with 12 spare 2.5" SAS3 slots.

I could even dedicate one of the onboard 10Gb NICs for just the network these cameras are on.

Although, I’m trying to avoid using that system because if it ever gets restarted or goes down, my video surveillance system is also down.

NAS going down

The system going down is rare, but it happened recently when all of a sudden, it started rebooting every 5-10 min.

To fix it, I had to destroy and recreate the zpool then wait for all my data to copy back. That sounds simple, but it took 3 days of debugging to pin down the issue; all the while, I was leaving the system off.

If I had a way of running my surveillance system in a sub-par state on a Raspberry Pi in the event of a catastrophe like that, then I’d be fine.

This is why I put my self-written IoT software (lights, buttons, switches) on a Raspberry Pi even though it’d be way more convenient to have it all on the same server.

Space constraints

Also, in this chassis, there’s no room for a GPU let alone a PCIe Coral card. I’m literally using every PCIe port right now. If I used bifurcation, I could find a way to split an x16 port into two x8 ports, but how I fit that all in the already space-limited chassis is beyond me!

[Sawtaytoes]

I really appreciate you guys recommending some cameras!

@Shadowbane Synology always seemed like a closed system, but if their cameras are open and well-supported, that might be an option. Better than constantly waiting on Ubiquiti for slow restocking and updates.

@ucav117 I appreciate you giving me two brands to look into: “reolink” and “Amcrest”.

I understand you may have bought these brands yourself and have more knowledge about their manufacturers.

I’ve never heard of these manufacturers and my first impression from going to their website is “these are probably Chinese cameras”. Not “made in China”, but “the company is based in China and reports to the Chinese Communist Party” kinda thing.

I could be completely wrong though! I’m hoping you have more insight!

[Sawtaytoes]

@ucav117 I looked up Amcrest, and they seem reputable based on this video that Wendell recommended:

We Bought Over $30,000 Worth of Surveillance Cameras

So that’s another option along with Synology cameras.

I like that they do the decoding and AI on the camera itself. I could easily run this on a Raspberry Pi now!

I don’t like the idea of having little computers in the camera though. More stuff that can go wrong, but it’s less network traffic and the operation is going to be more consistent.

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Instead of creating separate switches for these, I want to use VLANed ports on my switches. More convenient since I already have Ethernet everywhere.

I just realized my outdoor cameras are WiFi. I can run an Ethernet cable to them, but it’s never gonna be that simple.

The doorbell is the most difficult. No clue how I’d easily replace it with the little space provided by the home builder.