While digital video surveillance systems offer an exceeding amount of rich features compared to their analog ancestors, they still require thoughtful design and deployment to ensure maximum cost-effectiveness. Among the various criteria that impact surveillance network video recorder (NVR) system value, storage capacity can be particularly significant and easily misunderstood.
While digital video surveillance systems offer an exceeding amount of rich features compared to their analog ancestors, they still require thoughtful design and deployment to ensure maximum cost-effectiveness. Among the various criteria that impact surveillance network video recorder (NVR) system value, storage capacity can be particularly significant and easily misunderstood.
  • Higher image resolution
  • More active cameras
  • Longer archival periods
  • Intelligent video recognition

Abundant storage capacity is a fundamental enabler of such capabilities, and it is here that some video surveillance deployments can go amiss. In an effort to minimize costs, some NVR systems may utilize multiple low-cost, low-capacity hard disk drives (HDD) to meet their storage requirements. On its surface, this approach appears to be a viable option to reduce storage expenditures.

In conventional computing environments, HDD capacity is typically viewed only in quantitative terms; how much data can the storage system hold? But in the context of NVR solutions, drive capacity plays a key role in determining both the quantity and quality of data that the system can store.

Because 24×7 video streams are the very lifeblood of NVR systems, to deliver superior performance and efficiency in a given security environment, these systems must have sufficient storage capacity to address three fundamental video parameters:

Quantity—the number and time duration of the video streams
Quality—the image quality of the video streams, expressed in terms of frame resolution (for example, 1280×1024 pixels) and frames per second (fps)
Archiving—the length of time the video streams will be stored

Please contact one of our Kidon Security specialists to help you identify the perfect balance for you!