I have the following wishlist.
- 200 - 300 USD
- Future proof 3 - 4 years
- hot-swappable drives
- raid option
- Built-in POE
- Smoothly runs 5 - 10 POE cameras
- able to take any firmware, hikvision, dahua or can run blueiris, protect
- something like - set it and forget it kind of a system
If you go for BI, you'd need a seperate POE switch, if you go for a "standalone" NVR, you can consolidate both into 1 device. Just curious: why would you need hot-swappable for? Not that many "standalone" NVR use RAID (although some can host 1+ hdd) - if you want to have some extra redundancy, you can always setup your NVR to "ftp" clips into a NAS for offloading.
And not sure if you would like to add a UPS to your camera system, then it's really set-and-forget.
My advice: if you go for (eg) dahua cams, go for dahua NVR (stick to the same brand, or you might miss out IPC capabilities like IVS). BI on the other hand is brand-agnostic.
Good luck!
CC
