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Tech Tip 14- Life cycle costs of surveillance systems (continued)

Storage - useful life cycle of 4 years

Storage of surveillance can add significant costs to a system, especially when there is no room for failure. Hard drives are the major point of failure, a good warranty and enterprise-type disks are essential on complex sites. Many disk replacements and rebuilds can greatly affect video performance and result in loss of footage

Direct attached solutions (DAS) and storage area network (SAN) are recommended above network attached storage (NAS) solutions as it can have fragmentation issues over time. SAN solutions that move data at a block level are better than DAS solutions that move data at a file level; however, some hybrid solutions also exist.

Raid 5 and 6 are used for redundancy in an array of disks. RAID 6 with hot spare disks adds the greatest redundancy. A general rule of thumb is that the bigger, faster and more reliable storage gets, the more expensive it will be as well.

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