Should I get 2 separate NAS or just 1?

[eddie500]

I need a NAS to both record video from my IP cameras home surveillance and also for extra hard drive space for video / pictures.

Would it be better to use two separate NAS or can I just get a single large NAS?

Can a large NAS be split up, like with 3 drives allocated for IP cameras, and 2 drives allocated to video / picture file storage? This way I can use multiple RAID options on the same NAS, say raid 0 for three drives and raid 1 for two drives.

Thanks

 

[Abula]

Really depends on your needs. Power wise and cost wise, is better to go with a single setup, specially if you are running the Camera Server 24/7, thus the cost of adding more drives is not that high even operation with disk able to spin down wont matter much. Now two server setup i would go if you were like me, that my storage serve only gets turn on maybe once every two weeks sometimes once a month, its mainly for pure storage purposes not to serve a network. Another reason why i went with split servers was i wanted to have the ability of adding drives one by one, lots of times this cant be done with raid oriented servers.

Now one thing that could limit you is the software you will use for the camera server, for example blue iris would require windows that you can probably VM it, but something to consider so your OS can do the pass-through.

You could also go with something premade like Synology that have a surveillance station, that could work for both things, given that its limitations on the cpu.

 

[SolarBeam]

I would not recommend using RAID 0 if you have a critiacal data.
Or you should have some solid backups.
Check out RAID 5 as an option.
Then you can split a virtual disk in 3 partitions.
Or use NAS, SAN.
As NAS - Synology is good.
As SAN check the StarWind which can be used via iSCSI.