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Budget (including currency): Under $1000 Canadian Country: Canada Games, programs or workloads that it will be used for: Plex Server (Stream details below), Blue Iris NVR and future expansion (VMs or Bare Metal) Other details I have two HP Z-Book G2s (i7-4910MQ/32GB RAM/Quadro K2100M) from 2015 that I got from work that run the following, Z-Book 1 - Blue Iris Surveillance Software - 30% CPU Usage/No GPU Usage - 24/7 @ 85-Watts Z-Book 2 - Plex Server/PIA VPN/qBittorent/Tdarr (Server Only but would like to run Client on the new box) - Up to 7 or 8 1080p Plex Streams (worst case). Usually 5 or 6 of them are Direct Play with 1-2 being Transcodes - 24/7 @ 40W idle/150-175 Watts all out depending on the number of streams. I have Plex Pass so I use GPU Hardware Acceleration for the transcoding. I'm looking for a low power consumption build that I can use as a VM host (or Bare Metal OS if someone can convince me that is better) that can consolidate the two laptops. I'd like some headroom as well in the event I want to run additional services. I'm not too concerned about RGB/Fancy cases as it will be living in a utility room. The shelf I have for it is 23" Wide x 11" High x 16" Deep so it will need to be on its side. Ideally a few front USB ports and some space for extra 3.5" HDDs would be nice. Someone in another forum suggested an i3-13100 system with either the iGPU or an Intel A380 (No gaming, Plex/Tdarr transcodes only), 64GB of DDR5 and a couple RAIDed NVME drives, but it has been MANY years since I have built a PC and figured I would reach out to you fine folks to see what you can suggest to replace the Z-Books. I did manage to grab two 14TB Seagate External Drives for $130 off (each) at Best Buy yesterday, so those will be shucked and replace the myriad of external drives I currently use with the Z-Books. Other than that, I'll need suggestions for all other components. Ideally I'd like to keep it under $1000 CDN if at all possible but I have no idea if that's possible for what I want to use it for. I do have 2.5Gig Networking but have a 2-Port 2.5G PCIe NIC I can use if the motherboard doesn't include it.

Alright, so this is definitely going to be an edge case scenario, but I figure that's what y'all are here for. Just closed on a house and am getting the security system set up. We're using the Eufy S380 home base(the "Manual" can be found here) with 3 cameras around the house, potentially more to be added if necessary. The S380 comes with a 16gb onboard flash chip that allows for motion detection recordings for up to a month, but does not allow for 24/7 recording, something I'd like to have for all cameras. It has one 2.5" hard drive expansion slot with "unlimited" capacity restrictions, and this is where my problem lies: Primarily, I don't think that any 2.5" drive out there is going to be reliable or performant enough to handle 3 2k+ cameras recording 24/7(though I'm happy to be proven wrong!). Secondarily, if I'm going to expand this, I want it to be EXPANDIBLE. I'm looking for an external hard drive or RAID enclosure that would allow me to connect a SATA cable to the Home Base, such that the home base sees the hard drive(s) as one disk. Is this a weird problem to have? yeah. Is it like trying to Quad SLI GTX 950's? perhaps. Do I want to instead shell out for the Unifi NVR and cameras? hell no. My question then involves the following: Does what I'm looking for exist, or can it be DIY'd within a reasonable amount of effort?

Hi All For our new house (2 floor apartment), we're trying to work out the best solution for various things. We had worked out most of our issues by going with Unifi despite the more limited product access in China. The main thing that Unifi don't seem to have as a product (that I would really like) is being able to control the main door access/communication from their ecosystem. I'm not tied into their product stack yet, so am open to going with other solutions, but here is a quick run through of what we were looking to do. Server cabinet: UPS 1 or 2 from Eaton's Chinese subsidiary. Switch USW-24-PoE Need a good PoE with ideally the newer BT standard UDM-Pro-U (Dream Machine) This would obviously act as the brain for it all, as well as some additional ethernet availability. It would also act as the primary NVR. Not a huge fan of this as there is only 1 HDD bay but they don't sell the dedicated NVRs here. Cameras G3 Flex Just for some indoor options PoE UVC-G3-PRO For outdoor PoE WAP U6 Pro Not in the cabinet, would have 1 for each floor. PoE Modem, some generic one from ISP Door access 1 for each main door This does not seem to support a replacement for the main apartment door access. Server Will work on this after moving in, will be a home server for file storage, HASS, NVR backup etc. I know that there are other solutions we could look into but I do kind of like the Unifi ecosystem, though I know once I'm in, getting out will be more challenging. If I were to go with HASS and a more random assortment of parts such as dedicated NVR, switch, network management, there are pretty much limitless options, but with a lot of additional difficulty and effort. Considering the above that I had planned, what would be your take on this and what would you do instead with a non-Unifi setup to achieve the same/better result with HASS, especially around the main door access? Many thanks in advance for any feedback!

Hello, I was wondering if its possible to use a mixture of an SSD and hard drive for a network video recorder for security camaras. Like for example I would want most recent footage up to a week stored on the SSD and then have that footage moved to the hard drive for longer term archival after a week has passed. How would you implement this if possible? I will just be using a VMS like blue iris on a pc I built. The reason I want to do this is incase I need to watch a clip of something that occurred and I want smooth and fast playback. Also I realized this would probably wear out the ssd a lot quicker, so I was planning on purchasing a small enterprise level ssd. Thanks in advanced!

I am trying to connect my NVR camera system (from getscw.com) to my FreeNAS server. In the NVR setup I can add a NAS drive but it doesn't give me the option to include a username and password to the share. I'm pretty new to FreeNAS so any help would be appreciated.

Hi, I have been thinking too much about PCI Express Lanes recently as I wanted to build a new medium cost surveillance system for 64 channel Hikvision NVR. I have selected ASUS PRIME B250-PLUS Motherboard and Intel Core i7-7700 Processor for the same. So here are my doubts, In the Intel spec, B250 chipset have 12 PCIe Lanes and i7-7700 have 16 PCIe Lanes supported. But the motherboard is having 2x PCIe x16, 2x PCIe x1 and 2x PCI slots available. So in effect, how many PCIe card with what configuration can I use? Is this MO making a bottleneck as it got 4Lanes lesser than cpu supported? For surveillance of such 64 channel NVR that work 24/7, what could be the recommended system configuration needed? Does adding Intel Optane card helps in any ways for surveillance?

Hey peeps! Now i know there is a very similar topic from another guy but i don't want to hijack his thread so here is my own... I needs some suggestions as to what would be the best solution to my new multi purpose server... I have a few requirements... 1. Needs to run plex 2. Needs to some kind of NVR solution... for 3-7 cams 3. Some kind of raid solution/NAS solution (storage for plex content, NVR storage and so on..) 4. maybe run a few vm's ( hackingtosh, steam cache server (maybe)) Hardware i have the following.. Cpu: Ryzen 1700 Ram: 16GB - maybe upgrade to 32gb if needed SDD: 1x 120GB SSD HDD: 5x 8TB HDD for some kind of raid configuration... pssst (no raid/hba card installed) Now... should i install some baremetal debian/windows and then raid the 5 HDDS? and do as much as possible on baremetal and then a hyperviser on top to fix remaining issues? or should i go hyperviser from the start such proxmox, esxi? and then VM each task from my needs? How should i handle the NAS/raid solution?? I just installed proxmox working with a working xpenology vm on top.. is this ideal way to handle the disk situation and then make other VM's that just dumps data to that?.. and what about the hot topics/debated solutions like freeNAS & unraid...

I'm sure I'm not the first to replace the noisy fan in their NVR so what is everyone using. Stock fan is a Delta Electronics EFB0412HHD 12v, 9.9CFM,30.5dB, 8200RPM https://www.digikey.ca/product-detail/en/delta-electronics/EFB0412HHD/603-1397-ND/2560521?utm_adgroup=Fans+%26+Thermal+Management&mkwid=s2HCSXBpQ&pcrid=267488347852&pkw=&pmt=b&pdv=c&productid=&slid=&gclid=Cj0KCQjw4fHkBRDcARIsACV58_Ed3ALEjClhQb3SzsITs_VIT9XgPuPk_QkdcRvWcjbehOD1BhumIAwaAu4OEALw_wcB The only fan noctua has that will work is the NF-A4x20 FLX 12v, 5.5cfm, 14.9db,5000RPM, 19$ These fans are all over amazon and seem to be a good competitor. https://www.amazon.ca/Quiet-Gdstime-Brushless-Cooler-Cooling/dp/B078K55H8T/ref=sr_1_8?keywords=40mm+fan&qid=1553812778&s=gateway&sr=8-8 12v, 8.3CFM, 22dB,5800RPM 13$ Not sure if the noctua would cool the power supply enough.... Thoughts?

I'm looking for a rack mountable NAS to be a general file depository, PLEX server, and NVR; right now I'm eyeing up a Synology RS1219+ but have a few questions. Synology RS1219+ 1) Is the Atom C2538 really enough to run plex on 2-3 devices? Right now It's all 1080, but 4k video files are certainly coming so I want the power to handle that. 2) Does anyone have any experience with using a Synology NAS as an NVR? Is this really the best way to go, or should I look at a dedicated NVR? 3) *Dumb Question Alert* This is an 8 bay NAS, can I populate five or six of the bays right away, then populate the remaining slots in the future as needed, or will this cause issues with the RAID configuration. I'm currently thinking RAID6 but I'm no expert, so if that's dumb I can move to something else. Thanks in advance for the advice!

Hello, Im looking for less than 10 4k IP cameras with good IR night vision. I dont care if they are made by Dahua or Hikvision or some other Chinese outfit as long as they are less than USD $250 and work well. They will be on a seperate vlan not connected to anything but the server so they cant call home. Im also struggling to find NVR software. It needs to have all the cameras show up on one web page and be able to record to hard drives in the server. Something like motion would work but i havent been able to find out what cameras work with it and which ones dont. I have a DL360p G8 running debian 10 (buster) with 2x E5-2640 (6c 12t each). I keep seeing Blue Iris mentioned a lot of places. If that is the way to go, can it be run on my debian server? I had looked into the UVC-G4 PRO's but they are expensive and unifi-video is not being developed anymore. Any advice will be appreciated, Andy

Hi I'm new to the forum so apologies if this is in the wrong section. Let me know if it should be else where. What I want: File sharing (samba, afp, ftp) fast but affordable (so gigabit but not 10) torrent downloader (running in a virtual machine with a VPN). virtual machine capabilities for general messing around with new OS's and server OS's The odd game server (wow emulators) NVR for simple POE home security system. HTPC 4k capable (no need to game) to stream locally stored content as well as stream. Current potential plans: 1. All in one server running Debian. 4x2TB HDD as NAS raid 5, another HDD for NVR, and a boot SSD. A long HDMI cable to another room to the TV with kodi running. 2. A NAS (likely freenas) and seperate HTPC (likely debian) with one of them running the virtual machine for torrent downloading over VPN and also a NVR 3. Option 1 but with a raspi HTPC instead of long HDMI (can this handle 4k?). I'm looking for a solution around £700 (excluding security camera gear). Here are my questions: Which potential plan do you recommend or is there a better? What hardware would you recommend (i3? xeon? ECC ram?) How loud will 4x2tb HDD be? Could I put this server in a living room or would it be unbearable? A NAS designed HDD (WDD red) something I should get, are they worth the extra price? Would rack mounting be more or less expensive option?

Good afternoon, I'm looking to do a somewhat complex system build, I don't have a solid spec in mind which is why I need a second opinion. What I intend to accomplish with this system is this: 1. To run 4-6 cameras at 1080p 8 FPS recording 24/7 2. To run a media server that my family can remote into anywhere and view family photos, videos, etc. in one central location Currently, my plan is to take some NAS machine like a FreeNAS Mini box or a Synology box and run Windows for a recorder manager software such as Blue Iris while running a Windows VM for my family to RDP into as regular users and access a pooled drive. Alternatively, I had also thought of doing a lower tier Ryzen or Threadripper build, but priced out with the features I would need was pretty expensive. The idea here was to do a 4X6TB RAID 10 array and partition the pool of drives into an 8TB partition for recorded video and 4TB for media storage. I guess my question is 1. Is this even possible with the way I'd like to do this? and 2. Is this recommended or are there better ways to do this? To me, the hardware in the pre-built NAS boxes doesn't seem like enough, and what would be adequate is terribly expensive. Most of the CPU load would be for video encode/decode, but I'd like to leave at least 2C/4T or 4C/8T for simultaneous multi-user login on the VM. Any and all help is definitely appreciated, thank you in advance!!

What’s up fellow techies, does anyone have suggestions on a 8 channel PoE NVR surveillance system? Looking for a wide angle/HD 4MP or more camera. With 1080p or higher resolution, nigh vision, motion detection and the other usual specs. So many brands out there hard to decide.

I got contacted by a friend of mine to come out and look at some camera's at his business. Hes currently running a mix of fisheye and bullet cameras and all of them are analog. Its a Nuvico branded system but literally can't find any model or information or anything that remotely resembles the installed DVR. The equipment is about 15+ years old and over half of the cameras aren't working. Sometime this week I'm going to go out and do some more digging around to see if working with his old equipment is even an option. I want to be able to give him a couple possibilities however and wanted to ask what your guys favorite camera systems are?? If I'm putting in new equipment I personally would like to go poe and run everything back to a central server however I would like opinions on that too. Thanks

I have a Speco NVR and I need to view it out of the home and all of the ISP ports are blocked what should I do?

My tech friends, Been in security/cam business 20+ years, absolutely Love LTT... quick question for your advice... My NVR at home has 3x 3TB HDD (9TB total) and searching and access is just fine, I was thinking of switching to SSD or SSHD of similar (or more storage up to 4TB each) but I've read that the specs for SSD or SSHD really shouldn't shoulder the 24/7 uptime that the HDD's are performing. They are benchmarked for heat and lifecycle as an 8x5 (8 hours / 5 days a week) which obviously won't work. Last thing i want is total failure, but does anyone have an opinion that this would be a bad thing to do, or will it work fine? It's located in a cool, dry place, on 24/7, no coolers (BC it's a wall mount NVR), but access both internal and remote seem a little sluggish (nothing i can't live without, just trying to optimize). Thanks

Hi all, I'm going to make a home server for my parents and I need some feedback on the hardware shopping list. It will be used primarily as a network video recorder (NVR) for a few 720p IP cams. If possible it will be used as a media server and backup server too. Do you guys think it will be powerful enough to do this kind of stuff? Be Quiet! power supply unit: System Power 7 300W - (€ 28,50) Cooler Master CM Storm Elite 130 - € 36,26 Western Digital Purple WD10PURX - 1TB - € 53,03 MSI J1900i mitx j1900 so-ddr3 mb - € 64,71 2x Kingston ValueRAM - 2GB - SO-DIMM, 204-pole - DDR3L - 1333 MHz / PC3L-10600 - CL9 - € 26,84 Total: € 259,25 (280 USD or 364 CAD) So I chose this motherboard because of the integrated cpu which has a low power consumption, is cheap and still has dual memory channels. Do you think I need dual memory channel for this work it will be doing? Any form of feedback will be appreciated. Note that the target price is around €250 (270 USD or 350 CAD) Note: I live in the Netherlands, so pricing may differ. Note2: is there an alternative to that pcpartpicker thing which has the msi j1900i listed?