Network-attached storage keeps an eye on your stuff

Look Sharp

Article from Issue 143/2012
Author(s):

Take advantage of the low watt per operation compute power offered by modern NAS to monitor your cameras.

Modern off-the-shelf NAS hardware often has a CPU buried in it that offers great computing performance per watt. Many of these units require less than 10 watts to operate with a gigabit network link-up and the CPU at 100 percent use. A low-power-consumption NAS might consume 10 to 20 percent of the electricity that desktop hardware would need to run. The primary question then becomes: Is the CPU in the NAS “fast enough” to monitor one or more cameras and detect motion when it occurs?

In this article, I examine whether the QNAP TS-219P II, with a 2GHz Marvell ARM CPU and 512MB of RAM, is up to the challenge of real-time motion detection (Figure 1). Note that much of the article should also be directly applicable to its cheaper single-bay cousin, the QNAP TS-119P II, which sports the same CPU/ RAM.

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