Video surveillance is all about the capturing and retrieval of video data that document important events. That said, the role of storage is vital, allowing operators to obtain the necessary footage that they need. “Storage in a surveillance system is mainly for saving video recordings, which is the most important part
Video surveillance is all about the capturing and retrieval of video data that document important events. That said, the role of storage is vital, allowing operators to obtain the necessary footage that they need. “Storage in a surveillance system is mainly for saving video recordings, which is the most important part of the surveillance system,” said Max Wu, Product Manager at Synology.
With IP surveillance now becoming dominant, two storage solutions have emerged, namely NAS and SAN. “NAS and SAN are both optimal storage solutions for surveillance projects, from small to large-scale deployment,” Wu said. “Recently there are several NAS products appearing on the market for home or small business users. When it comes to large-scale deployments with thousands of cameras, a massive NAS or a SAN structure provides sufficient storage capacity. However, for most cases, NAS will be enough in terms of cost and performance.”
When purchasing NAS, the buyer must have data reliability and integrity in mind. Among the things to be considered are whether the NAS allows edge recording and what level of RAID it supports. “For most of the cases, RAID 5 is recommended. There is one hard drive fault tolerance, which provides the data protection and integrity yet maximizes the utilization of storage capacity,” Wu said. “However, RAID 5 is only suitable for NAS with more than three hard drives. For NAS with only two hard drives, RAID 0 should be the most suitable data protection solution.”