Hikvision NVR's and SSD Drives

K

keithjmason

n3wb
Oct 16, 2014
2
0
Hi,
Just wondering if I could use an SSD drive in an Hikvision NVR, or may I come across issues ?

Trying to create a 'silent' box.

Thanks!
 
While technically you could, it would be a HUGE waste of money...also you are limited to 1tb per drive where if you get a spinner you can do 4tb ... the newer drives are virtually silent. I doubt you would have issues with wearing out the drive, but I would not go that route..
 
I wonder how a Hikvision NVR would treat a 6TB drive. It seems like every couple of years, hard drive manufacturers build a drive that is larger than most current computers will support for whatever reason.
 
it will handle a 6Tb drive or a 20TB drive the same as a 1Tb drive.. its just a cover your ass thing so they dont get sued: You said it supported something that didint exist and now that it does exist it dont work!

The limit back in the day was the filesystems couldn't handle large drives, that issue is long gone for all operating systems... before that the limit was on IDE-UDMA ~160GB, that was EONs ago :)

A SSD will work absolutely horridly for a NVR, put a Video Recording HDD or two in it (WD Purple) and you wont hear them... a NVR just writes a never ending stream to the HDD's, this is actually very quiet.. its seeks and random reads that typically make a drive emit audible noise, and a NVR wont be doing those very often.
 
I have a stringent hardware requirement for NVR storage. My customers wants up to 40 TB of storage using a bank of SSD drives, this is so because of their quietness and reliability, can someone please recommend an NVR product that can satisfy this requirements?
Reason for that much storage is a requirement to continuously record 24*7 for up to 90 days.
 
itlabsman said:
I have a stringent hardware requirement for NVR storage. My customers wants up to 40 TB of storage using a bank of SSD drives, this is so because of their quietness and reliability, can someone please recommend an NVR product that can satisfy this requirements?
Reason for that much storage is a requirement to continuously record 24*7 for up to 90 days.
Click to expand...

You won't find an off-the-shelf product with that much storage, especially not with SSD drives. If this is serious, take a look at https://www.backblaze.com/blog/storage-pod-evolution/ and maybe even consider these: http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2015...-inch-16tb-ssd-the-worlds-largest-hard-drive/

Either way you are looking at tens of thousands of dollars in hardware and specialized software to manage it all (you can probably find some flavor of linux that is up to the task). And that is before even considering a backup system.
 
itlabsman said:
I have a stringent hardware requirement for NVR storage. My customers wants up to 40 TB of storage using a bank of SSD drives, this is so because of their quietness and reliability, can someone please recommend an NVR product that can satisfy this requirements?
Reason for that much storage is a requirement to continuously record 24*7 for up to 90 days.
Click to expand...
Dahua makes a super NVR with 26 sata ports...Using SSD's for this purpose is a complete waste of money...
http://www.dahuasecurity.com/products/nvr724-256724d-256724r-256724dr-256-582.html
 
The HDDs are about the quietest part of my Hik NVR. I'd say the fans are noitcable but the loudest part seems to be a whirr from the POE MOSFETs... If anyone has an idea on how to silence those, please let me know!
 
Main goal of an SSD would be the speed, the other benefits are no moving parts so no noise, lightweight and low heat.

To match the capacity of a standard hard drive would cost $$$$. If moneys not an issue, go for it.

For 40TB of storage I hope they got deep pockets.

OP which NVR do you have? must be a non POE model.
 
fenderman said:
Dahua makes a super NVR with 26 sata ports...Using SSD's for this purpose is a complete waste of money...
http://www.dahuasecurity.com/products/nvr724-256724d-256724r-256724dr-256-582.html
Click to expand...

ok, ok, I get it. Let's drop the SSD requirement for the time being. How much a storage will be required to handle recording live video from 16 cameras (24*7) for 90 days? Assume I can get them in SaTa, what should I be looking for? What's important is the ability to retain more than 60 days of video only recording 24* 7?
I am appreciative of all the subsequent responses.

Thank you all.
 
According to Hikvision calculator.

Say each camera has a bitrate of 6144kbps for 90 days continuous it works out to be 98, 140GB aka 99 TB for 16 cameras.

The cost to run an array that large with SSDs would be prohibitively expensive and unnecessary. Large businesses here don't even run SSDs for important data, they still run 15k RPM drives in large RAID arrays with backups.

EDIT:

Just for fun:

16 cameras at 6144kbps x 24/7 x 60 days = 66TB
16 cameras at 4096kbps x 24/7 x 90 days = 66TB
16 cameras at 4096kbps x 24/7 x 60 days = 44TB

Anyways enough Hijacking OP thread.
 
Last edited by a moderator:
Dropping the SSD requirement (which would have been an extremely poor choice to begin with) then you are still looking at many thousands of dollars and a large, heavy server. But perhaps under $10k altogether for the storage system. Lets assume you built it with Western Digital Red 6TB drives which cost $250 each. Lets say you build a system with 12 of these and use 2 for redundancy in a RAID-type setup. I don't know if 2 is a good number. Maybe it should be 3. Anyway, that is going to come out to $3000 for 72 TB of raw storage. Take away two drives (12 GB) for the RAID redundancy and you have 60 TB. Now I can tell you from experience that using FreeNAS for an operating system and ZFS as the file system, a "12 TB" array only delivers 10.2 TB. Lets assume you use the same FreeNAS OS. That is 15% overhead. So you could expect about 51 TB usable, or enough for just over 60 days video at 4096 Kbps bit rate. As a side note, I'd recommend no higher than 15 FPS frame rate to offset the slightly low bit rate.

So anyway that $3000 is only for the drives. You still need a server with 12 SATA ports, 12 drive bays, and a ton of RAM. The rule of thumb for FreeNAS and ZFS file system is 1 GB of RAM per 1 TB of raw disk space, but you can apparently get away with less RAM for really large systems like this. I'd shoot for minimum 32 GB but maybe as high as 64 GB? I haven't built an array larger than 24 TB of raw space and for that I used 24 GB of RAM. It has to be ECC RAM for optimal reliability, too. The cost not including the hard drives is going to approach $2000 I bet. So $5000 for the entire storage system. And if the data is mission-critical then you might consider building two and setting up some form of automated backup between them. Of course the cost could go up rapidly if you need to put in more drives since that will require ever more server hardware to accomplish. Good luck!
 
The RAID controllers alone can be extremely expensive.

Let's just go back to the SSD idea since this thread has seemed to turn into a discussion. SSDs are probably the worst choice ever for storage like this, they do have fairly limited write cycles and will then just die. So do mechanical drives however they do give you some warning they're on their way out. I mean even to buy enough drives for a decent amount of storage would set you back easily thousands, tens of thousands. Then because the drive capacities are lacking you would need more of those drives, not even including the ones you lose if you run them in a RAID array.

Ahh freeNAS it's been a while since I played with that. Pretty awesome for something that's free. You could build an array large enough running FreeNAS all you'd need then is a RAID controller with enough ports. At the same time the system you'd buy to handle a system like this would be commercial grade and would already run ECC memory.

Just remember KISS, keep it simple stupid.

I'd like to hear what direction you end up going if you ever come back. Keep us posted.
 
Remember FreeNAS uses software-based RAID, not hardware-based. You just need to be able to connect all the hard drives to the system reliably, so less-expensive SATA cards would work.

Those 256 channel Dahua NVRs might work too and be simpler to set up (maybe?) but I would trust FreeNAS more. That is, if a Dahua NVR can even be configured to use an NVR instead of its own internal storage. I don't use hardware NVRs so I don't even know that such a thing is possible with them. I just assume it is because it would be silly to be lacking that capability.
 
Yeah, I was thinking more of finding a single card that has enough SATA ports, generally the ones that do have a RAID controller built in.

Again the beauty of FreeNAS, gotta love it.
 
You might also want to look at UnRAID from limetech if you want to go with a NAS. It's super simple, uses standard SATA drives/controllers and you can add drives at any time, and of any size (up to the size of the parity drive.. which you can also increase at any time). You can run it on almost anything. (I'm spinning a 10TB media server on an old AMD Sempron, along with a torrent server, Minecraft server, and a few other apps). If the PC dies, you just move the drives to another PC and boot up or just hook the drives up to any PC to read the data. I've been very happy with it for about 8 years now. I believe there is an NVR docker (linux app) for it as well.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Top Bottom