will it work as intended?

[tech-wreck]

so, I have an old dell optiplex 745, (pentium d 3ghz (or 3.4ghz, can't remember which), 4gb 800mhz ram, 750gb hdd) and I plan to use it for ip camera recording and network storage. i think I'll need more storage and an ethernet card to plug the cameras directly into it, but other than that, will the hardware be up to the job? and
how much hard drive space does a full hour of 1080p video take up?
thanks in advance

 

[IrnMan]

The hardware will be just fine for setting up a NAS and a camera, you can even do that kind of thing with a raspberry pi.

Recording 1 hour of 1080p video however is going to be very storage hungry. At full 1080p that is 1920*1080 pixels, if you are using 8 bit (1 byte colour/grayscale) then that is 2073600 bytes per frame (around 2mb). Assuming you record at around 25fps then that is 50mb a second of uncompressed file size.

This is why a lot of 1080p movies actually have a resolution of 1920*800 and a lot of 720p movies have a resolution of 1280*536 as keeps the file sizes down.

 

[tech-wreck]

i figured some compression would be required, can anyone recommend any software that can record and compress two camera feeds at 1080p on a half hour continuous loop? and if it means buying another hard drive, what's the biggest and most capable thing that i could hook up to a sata2 connector?

 

[IrnMan]

I'm not entirely sure why you are wanting constant recording as you'll need lots of high capacity drives to store that much footage which you'll need to keep swapping out. Perhaps a better solution is to use software that will record footage when it detects motion, this way you won't have hours of recording when nothing is happening. (I'm just working off the assumption this is some kind of home/personal cctv setup you are looking for).

In which case there are two free/open source apps you may want to consider. The first is iSpy which works with Windows machines and the second is ZoneMinder which is for Linux machines. Also found a handy setup guide for ZoneMinder.

As for the hard drive, I believe the largest available drives are currently 6TB. The version of SATA doesn't really matter too much as they are backwards compatible, i.e you can plug a SATA 3 drive into a SATA 2 port. The only difference is the speed (backwards compatibility throttles speed). SATA 2 runs at a maximum of 3gb/s whilst SATA 3 runs at a maximum of 6gb/s.

 

[tech-wreck]

thanks, irnman, I will take a look at ispy. and i don't know why motion detection didn't occur to me...

so, I think 750gb will be enough for the time being.

[strike]just one more question, will any common or garden pci-e gigabit ethernet adapter do? (for the camera connections) /columbo[/strike]nvm

cheers