As others have said, they are in new condition. If you buy a skylake processor dell you know it cant be more than a few months old anyways as they only began shipping recently. Most are simply customer returns within the first 30 days. All my systems are refurbs or ebay/used for a month or two..no issues.
I love the NUCs. I have five myself (HTPCs and desktops). None running BI but I'm thinking about a NUC6i5SYH which has a 15watt i5-6260U processor (4314 Passmark). It also has an mSATA slot for an SSD and can support up to 9.5mm thick 2.5" HDD. Prices for them are about $350 without memory. 16gb of memory will run you about $65 on Amazon. WD makes a 1TB 2.5" A/V drive for $68 on Amaazon
I only use a small x86 system for my internet router (4 network ports), but even the little case-cooled Celeron J1900 is a surprisingly little thing (and overpowered for router-duty, but it was under $200 and had the four Intel gigabit NICs I wanted). The new quad-core NUCs appear to be amazing.
Its because they generally cannot house a 3.5 drive. Also they are more expensive for the same horsepower and they cannot support high power i7 processors, the i7 processors in the nucs are neutered. They are also easier to remove from the premises. Generally desktops are left alone.
If they can find it.
It is pretty easy to hide a 5" square 2" thick box. And yes, I agree that the i7 NUCs are not worth the money as they are only marginally (very marginally) faster than the i5s. If I go this way with my BI build, I'll make sure and document the build and set up for BI. I'm only going to have no more than four 4mp cams running 1080p. Not the 20 you guys are talking about.That CPU has a 8045 passmark. So a bit more than an i5-4590.
There is no need for a mirrored drive - hard drive failure is extremely rare, particularly for good quality ssd's. Most folks store the files locally. Not on network storage. Also, 3.5 drives are specifically available for NVR use like the WD purple. SFF is the best mix for this.
The cost for 4tb ssd would be astronomical...The drives are robust enough to withstand lots of rewirtes so unless you are writing crazy amounts of data, they will be just fine in that respect.
Yes you need mirrored if you don't want issues to appear/lower system uptime. I'm not using an SSD for storage - I've seen many SSDs die at work in workstations and SLC-based SSDs in servers in under 1-year of duty. Platter drive failures are more common than they should be as well - my older 2TB Samsungs are still the most reliable I have and have outlived the 3 and 5TB drives I have owned. Newer drives, many test bad out of the box, including more expensive WD Blacks and Reds. Seems we have about a 15% rate of failure on initial 1st-pass butterfly testing when we receive new-in-box drives (some SAS, some SATA).
I run, 20+ blue iris servers as well as many office machines, I think in the last 5 years I have had one hard drive failure. You have no redundancy for another of the other components so the redundant drives has minimal benefit. The hp elitedesk SFF are the roomiest I have seen, particularity if you remove the dvd..if you want true redundancy buy a cheap system as backup.
If we're talking solid-state SSD, sure, you are just as likely to have other devices physically fail. In systems with a hard drive, the disk drive is the only critical mechanical component, and you have the most to lose from it.
@fenderman, what do you mean by "the i7s in the NUCs are neutered"? I see the i7-6700 recommended for BI here all the time.
Don't mean to answer for someone else but it is all heat dissipation. The boxes are small, the fans are small and high GHZ CPUs generate more heat. So the CPUs in the NUC are clocked way lower than, say, a desktop cpu with a big fan on the CPU and 1 ore more big fans to get the heat out of the box.
They are CPUs made for laptop/NUC usage. Lower power. 2.5Ghz base frequency instead of 3.4Ghz - roughly 25-30% slower. If you don't need higher speeds though (50+ cameras?), they are a good option, albeit priced higher for the performance you get.
A person should be able to run at least 30 cameras on that CPU, yes. I'd estimate roughly 50-60% full-core usage on that CPU (25-30% in Windows task manager, showing hyperthreading). 20x 3MP@ 15fps D2D utilizing hardware acceleration. I wouldn't be surprised if 40 cameras were possible.