Good inexpensive cameras for DIY home surveilance system?

[Benjamin Blanco]

Hi, I'm thinking of putting together my own system but I'm on the fence about which cameras I should get. I don't want an NVR, and would prefer cameras that can be controlled by and record to a Linux server, must support PoE. Here's what I'm looking at (sort of in order of preference), feel free to suggest better alternatives:

D-Link DCS-2310L (720p, Supported in US, indoor/outdoor, ~$170 used)
LaView Panda LV-PC902F2-W (1080p, rebranded Hikvision, ~$120)
Foscam FI9853EP (720p, indoor only, quality nightvision, ~$80)

Thinking two cameras minimum, but three would be nice to have, and four would be ideal (1 kitchen, 1 living area, 1 hallway, and one outside). Can always get another switch and more cameras later on to expand if I need to, but that seems like a good start. If I end up with just two cameras, one will be outside, and the other will be in the house, so at least one needs to be designed for outdoor use. I like the stick cams too, but the ones above looked better for indoor use. I'm not a fan of dome cameras, but if they're good quality I'll still consider them.

Other hardware I'll probably be getting:
TRENDnet TPE-TG50g Switch (4 ports 100Mbps PoE & 1 gigabit $70 or refurb for $35)
Alternatively, EagleEye SW05i has pretty good ratings on amazon, but doesn't have a gigabit uplink port. May not be an issue depending on the cameras I get.
Two WD Red 1TB drives for RAID0 config, may just use a spare 1TB drive if the workload isn't too heavy. OS on separate flash drive, and another smaller drive for periodic backups.

 

[Kawboy12R]

I will stay out of recommending cameras for Linux systems. I haven't played in that sandbox for quite a while. I don't think I would recommend RAID 0 4 camera storage for cameras especially with the small number of cameras you have. You don't need the speed and you double the unreliability. Your CMS should support splitting the camera video among two volumes quite easily. Two cameras on one drive, two cameras on the other drive. It shouldn't differentiate between the two when doing playback. If you can't, then RAID 0 is a decent solution for combining the two into a single volume but then again so is JBOD. JBOD would hold the edge for forensically recovering your files in the event that one drive crashed though. I'd definitely do RAID0 if I needed a single volume and was going to be doing things other than just video storage for three or four cameras to it. The speed might be needed then. And yes, I've lost a RAID0 array used as my main boot/data partition.

Edit- correct a voice recognition goof.

 

[Benjamin Blanco]

Alright, don't need raid0. Wasn't planning on using it for the boot volume, but if it's that unreliable and unnecessary I guess I'll skip on it altogether--it was going to be on a UPS though, regardless.
This'll be a dedicated, low power machine just for recording--I might consider doing VMs, one for the cameras and one for NAS, later on, but for now I just want to get this up and running.

Edit: Ah, I guess an alternative to Linux would be running a known good Windows program in Wine or ReactOS, but I can't really test how well that works since I don't have a camera handy. I'll probably give that a shot while I'm testing things out.

Thanks.

Edit2: Decided I'm going to just get an 8-port PoE injector with a 48V 65W supply since I already have a non-PoE switch--should be enough for 4 cams at 16.25W each.
Also, considering the Hiksvision DS-2CD2432F-IW and DS-2CD2342WD-I since they cost the same or less than the D-Link cams on amazon, and have official English firmware.

Altogether, cable, crimp tool, cams (2) and injector, looks like $383.59. Still open to suggestions, but this looks like a pretty good start to me.