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I am planning on building out a system like this. I am currently working to get the RPI0W camera units into a weather tight 3D-printed case that screws into external light socket fixtures so I don't have to wire power. I'm going to start with MotionEyeOS and a few cameras to start because it looks like it is going to be easy to set up but I want to eventually add motion sensors and motion activated lights so that is phase two.

I am planning on building out a system like this. I am currently working to get the RPI0W camera units into a weather tight 3D-printed case that screws into external light socket fixtures so I don't have to wire power. I'm going to start with MotionEyeOS and a few cameras to start because it looks like it is going to be easy to set up but I want to eventually add motion sensors and motion activated lights so that is phase two.

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[–] • 1 pt

Yeah, I felt that was BS as well. Notice how he does not claim to actually be doing it?

But to the point: I am not sure a USB HD is even needed. My initial plan is to just use a 256GB SD card for a combined boot drive and storage drive

[–] • 0 pt

I'd go with an external device.

Micro SD cards are fairly robust, but they're not designed for the kind of writing you're going to get with a video surveillance system. They have a tendency to go bad when you're expecting them to be ok - I've had them go bad just powered up - in this case it was the FAT32 portion that does the bootloader of a Pi, and it transferred to a NFS mount on the network for it's OS. No writing ever, and the card still went bad.

An external drive provides a disconnected from the boot storage area, and you can have it NTFS only for easy connection instead of multi-partition SD card (you'd need FAT32 for the boot, EXT4 for the Pi, and whatever you prefer for /data.)

A 4TB external full size drive with it's own supply would be ideal here. One last thing to be aware of, on older units the USB ports are a bottleneck and can spike the CPU when intensive writing happens. I haven't played with a 4 enough to tell you similar.

[–] • 1 pt

A 4TB external full size drive with it's own supply would be ideal here.

I think 4TB would be over kill. I was assuming 6GB/h per video camera, so with 3-4 camera units I think I get 12h of buffer with 256GB storage and 24h with 512GB storage. I do not think I need a week of video buffer that i would get with 4TB. It would just drive up the cost.

[–] • 0 pt

I said 4TB just because it's getting harder to find small, full-size externals. If you can find a smaller one then it would work fine as well.

[–] • 1 pt

Micro SD cards are fairly robust, but they're not designed for the kind of writing you're going to get with a video surveillance system. They have a tendency to go bad when you're expecting them to be ok - I've had them go bad just powered up - in this case it was the FAT32 portion that does the bootloader of a Pi, and it transferred to a NFS mount on the network for it's OS. No writing ever, and the card still went bad.

You may have just been having really bad luck with SD cards. i have literally only ever had one or two go bad. The card running my OctoPi right now was harvested out of my very first phone that supported and SD... predates the smartphone erra. That SD has been running continuously since probably 2006

[–] • 0 pt

That may be, but when it comes to actual data storage I prefer something that has a better longevity when it comes to write cycles.

OctoPi really doesn't do much with the SD card other than write logs. The reason I mention all this is you're going to be writing larger amounts of data for longer periods of time, and that's just not what an SD card was designed for. It's all in what you want to spend, so it's whatever works best for you. I just prefer hard drives for lots of data writing.