Working on building small server hardware for nx witness
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I am dealing with a company that is possibly going to be building server hardware for small jobs to compete with pricing of Dahua/Hikvision NVRs. We are currently focusing on using raspberry Pi's. 4-6 cameras most likely. I was reading this article and forwarded it to them. https://support.networkoptix.com/hc/en-us/articles/360035982154-Building-Linux-based-NVRs
We got to the topic of storage. From the article above, "The storage performance of the platform should be good enough for the planned load. For example, it is known that such solutions as SATA-over-USB may lead to poor HDD performance, insufficient for recording the required number of cameras"
If I need more storage than an SD card with a Raspberry Pi. What would be the ideal way to get 4-8TB of storage connected to the server keeping the price point in mind. Would USB external hard drive be a complete wrong answer? Even if we don't use the Raspberry Pi's and move up to a NUC type device there is still not an option for an internal drive so I have the same issue and question at the point.
West KY Camera Co
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Hey Calvin Wientjes -
Good news! The Raspberry Pi and NUCs both can support SATA drives.
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Hi Calvin,
If you want to use ARM SBC, please assure that the os and server application is running on the storage drive and not on the SD card, otherwise, sooner or later SD card corruption is likely to happen.
Also, many ARMSBC share PCI lanes for network and USB ports which can limit the max bandwidth a lot and a 100 Mbit/s port suddenly have a real life capacity of ~30 Mbit/s.
I would opt for a fanless mini pc or a nuc in general is easier to setup. Both are pretty affordable and the mini PC's can even be found with slots for 3.5" drives.
You could check out this video about low power affordable hardware: https://youtu.be/9ssO6gJ03ak
For your idea, I use a NUC for my home system and a few RPI 3B for experimental use. The nuc I want to depend on 365/24/7, the RPI are for short term testing for which I don't want to setup a virtual machine.
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I have actually watched that video and it is really what gave me the idea that I could get close to Dahik NVRs prices and use DW Spectrum. I think Mini PC with 3.5 drive will be the ticket. I am not familiar with Linux at all but plan to use it so I don't waste resources on Windows. Can the Linux NX witness server app only be installed via command line like in the video or is there a way to do it via GUI.
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Hi Calvin Wientjes,
You can use the GUI, no problem. HERE a video that shows the process.
That being said. The command line isn't too difficult once you get the hang of it. HERE a video that shows the process how to install Nx via the command line.
The advantage of the command line is that you can use the headless (=no GUI) server version of Linux and this saves you on resources.
A nice introduction video into Linux and the command line can be found HERE.
If you want to go all the way, you can follow the Unix Workbench course HERE for free.
Linux isn't more difficult than any other OS, just different. It is more stable though and much more flexible.
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Digging this back up from 2 years ago.
I've built many systems since I started this thread. Mostly having server PCs built and some mini PCs. They've all used windows 10/11 pro. Ive had a few where I get BSOD or just freezes and hangs and have to manually power cycle to get everything back online and usable. Updates causing reboots and then issues with no connectivity. Not what I want for customers. So Im starting to test out linux and see what works best.
Currently I have a mini pc with a Celeron n5105 with 16GB ram. 256 SSD for the OS. 8TB WD Purple Pro Drive in a synology DS118 NAS. I installed Ubuntu 20.04 iot image (ubuntu-20.04-desktop-amd64+intel-iot.iso.) from this link https://ubuntu.com/download/iot/intel-iotg. Seems to be working very well.
My main goal is stability. These will not have a monitor attached. I like the GUI because we install Remote Desktop software, and it allows us to manage other things on the network that just the camera server. Is there a better version of Ubuntu you'd recommend to put together stable mini PCs for small Spectrum/Wave systems?
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Hi Calvin Wientjes,
I would go for the ordinary Ubuntu 20.04 LTS Desktop version if you want a GUI, since we do not support the IOT version and you might fall in to a dependencies issue sooner or later which most likely can be solved easily, but using the headless or desktop version would prevent it.
If there are other things on the network, you want to monitor, you still could use the headless version of Ubuntu and use the new webpage proxy in our software to access other devices in the network of the device.
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