I'm toying with the idea of building a small tower/desktop computer with an emphasis on low power consumption. It'll be used to house 2X 2TB (or greater) drives for DVR recording from 4X POE IP cameras. What specs would you recommend for such a system?
Ahh well....
DVR for CCTV requires a card usually with appropriate connectors. What sort of connectors do your cameras use?
I think the interfacing of the cameras to the computer and probably a card for that is going to be the problem. There are slews of CCTV cards out there, most are garbage, locked in vendor crap, Windows requirements, etc. There are Linux ones, and a good DIY project, however expect the learning curve and gotchas.
Those cards I suspect aren't very power efficient. Nor are they a good form factor. Tend to be PCI based.
As such, you are screwed into running a full sized desktop usually. Blows the ARM stuff out as no PCI and probably not compatible software worth using.
NUCs sound interesting, but again, lacking PCI slots probably - have yet to notice NUCs that aren't tiny and basically set top box size, so no PCI.
All this leads to why so many people by integrated DVR appliances. They just work and none of the quirks. Task appropriate devices big picture. Not saying these devices are great, because plenty of them suck too.
Drive wise, you are screwed with storage demands. Frankly I'd run a reasonable SSD drive in such and have another board with drive network connected with cron based job to move data off to it. Other board should be powered on at set time, job runs, it powers off. All CLI doable aside from the powering on and that can be facilitated with a Wake-on-Lan magic packet too.
DVR I'd do like 500GB SSD. SSD trumps all on power envelope and lowly demands. Saving literally watts per drive. No on/off cycle wear of the drive with SSDs either. Similarly you can bundle USB flash drive and use it first level for things.
Network computer with storage I'd use an ARM device. Odroids I am fond of. Orange Pi might fit the bill also with SATA single connector. Tethered to that I'd do maybe a 2TB hybrid HDD with integrated SSD. Samsung has these drives and Seagate. They work well, I use them, although less use than I'd like (about to change that).
If you need more storage, I'd tether a USB drive to the Odroid and a normal spinning rust harddrive.
POE is nice, but drawing power from that computer also or same area. So need to accommodate that demand.
Need to consider night time, IR lighting and demands on watts and usable optics. It's a real issue when you get out to rural and wide open space. Easy to get around your cameras and out of sight out there.
