Home Server for NAS and NVR

[Sparkomatic]

Hi all, I know this will have been asked before but I've searched so much that I'm getting overwhelmed trying to figure it out.

 

I currently have an old Netgear NAS box and a Hikvision 8 channel NVR (POE). I have some PC bits laying that I think will be suitable to build a home server to combine these two into one, with the possibility of adding more in the future, such as Plex server. What I'm trying to figure out:

• How much grunt the hardware needs (see below for list of current options)
• What operating system is best to use? Freenas? Windows/Windows Server? Linux?
• What software is recommended for the CCTV recording side of things, that will work with the OS. I'd like to record in H.265 if possible and want remote monitoring on my phone and would like to be able to view the camera feeds over my local WiFi at home
• What sort of HDD and HDD setup is best. Do I need NAS specific drives? Raid 1?
• Any other tips from anyone who has done the same

Current spare parts I could use..

• Gigabyte socket 1155 motherboard with a Core i3-2120 -OR- a Core i7-2600k, 8GB DDR3
• ASRock B150m Pro4S with a Celeron (Skylake) G3900, 8GB DDR4
• Antec NSK4480 case which I could fit up to six or seven 3.5" drives in I think -OR- a Silverstone ML03 which is a bit smaller and neater, but will only accommodate two 3.5" drives

Thanks in advance, any advice appreciated!

[Ibanez343]

I can only make recommendations from my own experience, but I've been super happy using Unraid.  It's not a free solution but it's a one time purchase with no subscription and well worth the money in my experience.  I built a server at home and then built one for my workplace.  There are tons of tutorials and guides online but I'll give a quick rundown of what I ended up with.

 

I'm using a 6 core Intel X5650 Xeon on an ASUS sabertooth X58 motherboard with 24GB of RAM (may upgrade the core system at some point but I have no reason to at this point).  So far I have 3 4TB WD red NAS drives (one drive is parity so I have 8TB of usable storage until I add more) and a 4TB WD Purple surveillance drive since I record my cameras 24/7.  I also have a couple SSD's for a cache drive and the other stores the virtual drive for my windows 10 VM.  I've played around a bit with Blue Iris for a NVR but it's never really stuck with me and the trial always runs out before I am comfortable moving over to it.  So for now I'm using iSpy connect to record motion event based recordings (I also use the face detection addon at work for event based recordings but at home it just detects faces all the time for some reason) while the Reolink client records 24/7.  This makes it easy to see a list of events in iSpy then look at the uncut high res footage from the Reolink client's recordings.  It's not a perfect solution (yet) but it's what I've got so far. 

 

One major selling point of Unraid to me was that when I do move to a new core system all I have to do is plug the Unraid USB stick in to the new system and I'm good to go without starting from scratch setting everything up again.  Not to mention adding new drives (or an additional parity drive) is dead simple (especially with hot-swap drive enclosures installed, although I do power down when adding drives).  I can also add a plethora of dockers / VM's to the setup with minimal hassle.  PLEX is available to run as a docker but to keep things simple I run it from my windows 10 VM.  The only thing I've ever had issues with in Unraid is GPU passthrough, I've had one board that it worked with and it was an old AMD Bulldozer system I was using to test out Unraid with the free trial.  

 

Like I said there are many free solutions out there with similar functionality to Unraid but I've never used them, and I have a hard time imagining they would be as simple to setup and rock solid.  

 

As for hardware recommendations I'd go with the i7 CPU for sure, especially if you catch the Unraid bug and start finding tons of functionality you want to add to your server.  I went with more expensive NAS / Surveillance drives for piece of mind.  I lost BOTH drives in a raid 1 array as a kid with tons of pictures and videos I had made and I've never been able to shake the paranoia since...

[Salacious B Crum]

x2 unRAID

[ZFarnworth]

Yes but Enterprise hardware would that be best?

[Salacious B Crum]

No not necessarily power consumption is usually high with enterprise gear not to mention noise some are extremely loud you can scratch build with consumer grade hardware with great success

[Sparkomatic]

Many thanks, I'll look into Unraid.

 

As for hardware, I'll probably use the socket 1151 G3900 option, I can always upgrade to an i5 or i7 in the future if I need to and it should use less power.

 

I want it to be as quiet as possible. One of the reasons for wanting to get rid of the Hikvision NVR is due to it being very loud.

 

Am I right in saying I should use a raid 1 array? Any further advice in this area appreciated!

[Salacious B Crum]

1 hour ago, Sparkomatic said:

Many thanks, I'll look into Unraid.

Am I right in saying I should use a raid 1 array? Any further advice in this area appreciated!

 

Not if your going with unRAID as it is not RAID but a parity protected array, the nice thing with unRAID is you can have 1 or 2 parity drives and will allow you up to 2 drive failures at the same time and still recover and if you were to have a drive fail above and beyond that (unlikely) only the data on the drive is affected meaning all other data is intact and can be moved to new hardware in the event it is needed. If you plan on a RAID array what one you choose is dependent on your need to preserve video files if you select to mirror then you will have a complete duplicate of your data at the cost of half the storage of a raid 0 I don't see a need to RAID 0 NVR scenario but thats not a area i'm strong in maybe someone can provide further clarity on that