Using TrueNAS as an NVR for Surveillance Cameras

[dontknowwhatimdoing]

Hello everyone,
Due to recent events I have felt the need to upgrade my home security system. I have been looking at POE cameras from Ubiquiti and Lorex, but for both systems I would need to pay a significant chunk of money for a Network Video Recorder (NVR). It seems to me there must be a way to cut out the cost of that NVR and use my TrueNAS server to do that job. Does anyone know how to do this?

 

[winnielinnie]

Jail (Core) or App (SCALE) with Zoneminder, and preferably a simple dedicated pool comprised of a 2-drive mirror vdev of WD Purple drives or Seagate's equivalent drives ("Skyhawk") that are designed for continuous writing.

I believe compatibility-wise, you'll have better luck with Lorex.

But I can't speak from experience, so hopefully someone here has actually set up a working DVR/NVR with TrueNAS and their own IP cameras.

 

[dontknowwhatimdoing]

Jail (Core) or App (SCALE) with Zoneminder, and preferably a simple dedicated pool comprised of a 2-drive mirror vdev of WD Purple drives or Seagate's equivalent drives ("Skyhawk") that are designed for continuous writing.

I believe compatibility-wise, you'll have better luck with Lorex.

But I can't speak from experience, so hopefully someone here has actually set up a working DVR/NVR with TrueNAS and their own IP cameras.

can you watch the live feed and record audio with zoneminder? I am assuming that it doesn't support camera lights or sirens or 2 way audio, which I kind of assumed going into this that without buying the proprietary hardware I'd lose some of that function, but a huge part of the reason I am doing this is to be able to throw the live feeds up on my third monitor.

Edit: also I wanted to add that I am not set on any specific camera, if people would like to recommend different ones that they know work.

 

[dontknowwhatimdoing]

as for the drives, my plan was to use my current pool, 2 vdevs RaidZ2 with 8 drives per. I was going to just set up a data set and (possibly) SMB share for cameras. I'm using enterprise grade 1tb drives, so I am not super worried about decreasing their logevity by continuous writes, and I'm also hoping to set up that the camera's only record for motion events. the main problem with a dedicated pool for me is that my server only takes 2.5 inch drives, which limits the capacity of the individual drives to like 2-3 tb. a simple mirror will severely hurt capacity.