I would suggest the first machine or the second. The choice would be: is it cheaper to buy the first one and add a 256gb SSD or cheaper to buy the second and add 8gb more ram. Additionally if you buy the vastly superior IPC-HDW5231R-Z camera reviewed on this site it will be cheaper and much better at night.
@fenderman is quite correct in recommending against the 5MP cams. The 5MP cams look great during daylight but perform very poorly at night. While the 5231 is a 2MP cam @ 1920x1080 the night time picture is spectacular and so very worth the loss in pixel count. I would suggest running the cams at 15fps, this site and many others will tell you that FPS above 15 give you almost nothing more of value or fluidity and cost a great deal more space. With fifteen 2MP cams running at 15fps 24/7 for 10 days you might be able to get away with an 8TB Western Digital Purple drive or else a 10TB should work. A copy of
Blue Iris and you are basically done. Install the OS and Blue Iris program files on the SSD. Some may argue to put the initial recordings on an SSD but I think putting them directly on to the WD Purple drive is perfectly fine. You can setup RAID if you like but keep in mind that those computer cases appear limited on space for drives, additionally you would need either hardware to have RAID or else use software for the RAID function which with that many cams writing to disk might become an issue for performance.
The cost appears to be:
The computer (say the 1st one): 399.99
Samsung 256 SSD: 82.97
WD Purple 8TB: 238.54
Blue Iris (no idea how much it is in the UK so we will use the US price): 60.00
Sub Total: 781.50
If you want all 15 cams as well, I have no idea how much they would cost in the UK so we will use the US price: 166 x 15 = 2490
Two 16 port Gigabit Ethernet switches with 8 PoE ports: 116.99 x 2 = 233.98
Grand total 3505.48
You might need some
CAT5e or CAT6 or CAT6a cabling to put those cams up. A box of 1000' of CAT5e from Monoprice on Amazon.co.uk is 73.95 plus maybe some crimps and a
crimping tool and the super ultra grand total looks to be about 3600.00. For everything you could possibly need.
Ideally I would suggest you manually assign the IP addresses to the cameras and give them the wrong gateway address so they cannot speak to the open internet. Second I would suggest that instead of forwarding ports and exposing the Blue Iris PC to the open internet you setup an OpenVPN connection on your firewall. If your firewall can't do this you can buy one that does. You can also find a halfway decent old PC and run pfSense on it. Using a VPN to access your Blue Iris PC and thus the cameras on it remotely is the safest way to go.
Sorry for the somewhat incoherent post but it started out small and just kind of grew. Hope this helps and isn't more confusing. Let me know if you would like me to clarify anything I said
