NVR & RAID Storage for Video Surveillance
Utilizing, Storing, and Protecting Footage with NVR and RAID Storage
Network Video Recorders by themselves are quite capable of storing away surveillance footage from your security system, but without using RAID storage, you put you and/or your company at risk of losing your surveillance footage if your storage device's hard drive fails.
Utilizing RAID storage can ensure that you or your company keeps all of the video footage that it needs, even if one or more hard drives fail depending on the type of RAID storage you opt to use. RAID stands for Redundant Array of Independent Disks, and requires at least one extra hard drive for information to be copied onto, and a RAID card to manage the array. If you need an NVR with RAID storage, contact Camera Security Now at (800) 440-1662, or click the quote button below!
RAID Storage
Most Common RAID Levels
RAID 0: striping without parity. If a single one of the drives in RAID 0 fails, the entire array fails and all surveillance footage and other data will be lost. The benefits of RAID 0 storage are in read/write performance, but the risk of dataloss means that this RAID configuration is not recommended for video storage.
RAID 1: mirroring. RAID 1 is the first form of RAID storage that provides redundancy. Every single hard drive in RAID 1 is an exact copy, which reduces maximum storage capacity to the size of the storage device with the smallest capacity in the array. So, (2) 1TB hard drives in RAID 1 has a maximum storage capacity of 1TB. Requires a minimum of (2) drives, but will remain operational as long as (1) drive is remaining.
RAID 5: block-level striping with distributed parity. RAID 5 is a more complicated form of redundancy that allows the array to remain operational as long as no more than 1 drive fails. RAID 5 requires a minimum of 3 drives, and reduces maximum storage capacity by (1) drive, so (3) 1TB hard drives in RAID 5 has a maximum storage capacity of 2TB.
RAID 6: block-level striping with double distributed parity. Similar to RAID 5, RAID 6 allows the array to remain operational as long as no more than 2 drives in the array fail. RAID 6 requires a minimum of 4 drives, and reduces maximum storage capacity by (2) drives. (4) 1TB hard drives in RAID 6 has a maximum storage capacity of 2TB.
RAID 10: striping and mirroring. RAID 10 is similar to RAID 1 in that storage capacity is significantly reduced, but this reduction provides an improvement to read/write performance. RAID 10 is achieved by having (2) or more groups of RAID 1 storage in RAID 0 configuration, and requires a minimum of 4 drives. RAID 10 reduces maximum storage capacity by at least one-half; a (4) 1TB hard drive configuration would have a maximum storage capacity of 2TB.
RAID 50: double block-level striping with parity. RAID 50 is (2) or more groups of RAID 5 storage in RAID 0 configuration, and requires a minimum of 6 drives. Using RAID 50 reduces maximum storage capacity by one drive per RAID 5 group; a (6) 1TB hard drive configuration would have a maximum storage capacity of 4TB.
RAID 60: double block-level striping with double parity. RAID 60 is (2) or more groups of RAID 6 storage in RAID 0 configuration, and requires at minimum 8 drives. RAID 60 reduces maximum storage capacity by two drives per RAID 6 group; a (8) 1TB hard drive configuration would have a maximum storage capacity of 4TB.