I’m looking for a compact NAS to back up events from my video surveillance system. Two drive bays is enough, maybe four at most. They can be 2.5" or 3.5", SATA or SAS, preferably populated with mechanical drives but even with reliable SSDs. It doesn’t need to handle more than a few GB per day of throughput and 16TB of total storage would be more than enough so it doesn’t need to support even more massive drives. I don’t care if it’s complete product like a Synology or something built from scratch using an SBC and adapters; all I need is RAID 1 and an SMB/CIFS file share, though I would like to keep costs low. My house is wired for Ethernet so wifi would just be a bonus but it might help to hide the device somewhere a burglar isn’t likely to see it like they will the NVR in my server rack. Also, a GNU/Linux-based OS is obviously mandatory or else I wouldn’t be on Lemmy.
Living on a busy street, my cameras would fill 40GB in just a few days. Ideally I’d like to have at least a few weeks if not months of retention. I’m also fiercely anti-subscription to the point of irrationality. I wouldn’t be in this community otherwise – I’d just have a Ring or Blink plan like a normie.
A Hetzner storage box could work, which is about $3-4/mo for 1TB.
But if you really want it local, a cheap SBC w/ a big SD card seems like a good option. It’ll be slow and you’ll need to replace the card periodically, but it will sip power and is incredibly easy to conceal.
I like that idea. I have an extra Pi Zero – would that work or do I need more processing power? I’m looking at storing around 5-15GB per day.
If it’s literally just copying data, a Pi Zero should be plenty, especially if there are gaps in between (i.e. motion detection). The main concern is if writing to the SD card can keep up, but I’d totally give it a shot first before buying something.