In The Trenches Video Series
RAID and Security Camera Systems
RAID is a critical feature for security camera systems, losing a hard drive could mean losing weeks or even months of footage.
Our speakers today are:
- > Matthew Nederlanden
- > Benjamin Larue
- > Michael Bell
- > James Campbell
James Campbell:
The minute you have a hard drive failure with that, whether that's three years from now or 30 years from now, you're going to be like, "Man, I'm glad I invested in RAID."
Ben Larue:
Yep. Well, welcome to another episode of the In Trenches Roundtable. Today, we're going to be doing a feature showcase. Today we're actually going to be talking about RAID, and I'm not talking about the bugs or rodents here. So I want to make sure everyone is aware we have our awesome panel with us again today. How's everyone doing?
Michael Bell:
Doing good. Hey, everybody.
Matthew Nederlanden:
Doing great.
Ben Larue:
Awesome. I'm really excited to dive into this one. Today, we're going to break down this video a little differently than we have before, and here's how it'll be. First, we're going to let you know what RAID even is. Then we'll cover who should be really interested in RAID. Then we'll walk through, and we'll talk about the details regarding RAID and the different RAID levels. We'll cover some considerations with RAID and then, finally, we're going to get our panel's final thoughts on RAID and how we should be implementing it. So without further ado, let's talk about RAID. So, James, start me off here. Give it to me. What even is RAID?
James Campbell:
I'm not sure. No, I'm only kidding. RAID, to get the name out of the way so we're not thinking about bugs, I guess, it stands for a Redundant Array of Independent Disks. In a nutshell, what it does is essentially gets all of your single, as the name kind of implies, independent disks, and it puts them into an array that allows you, in the event of a hard drive failure, to retain all of your footage. That's the nutshell of it. I do think it's important to also talk about how recording works with a normal NVR that doesn't have RAID. Michael, do you want to take that as far as a normal hard drive, how that works?
Michael Bell:
Yeah, definitely. So the way that the a traditional NVR without RAID is going to load its hard drives is it's going to copy all of the footage to one drive, then it's going to fill over to the next drive. If it does have two or more, it'll just keep on filling it up until everything is full. Then, it'll start writing over the oldest footage on that first drive and just continue on keeping on writing over everything.
James Campbell:
Yeah, and so let's use the example of that you have two hard drives, and hard drives-
Matthew Nederlanden:
Oh, it didn't work. It's blurring it. I brought visuals, and the background blurred them out.
Ben Larue:
No.
Michael Bell:
Put them in front of you. Put them in front of you.
James Campbell:
I'll have to edit it. I'll have to edit it.
Matthew Nederlanden:
All right, here we go.
James Campbell:
Oh, there you go, solid state drive.
Ben Larue:
No show and tell for you.
Michael Bell:
Do not use solid state drives in your recorders please.
Matthew Nederlanden:
Right. But we can use them to demonstrate what RAID is. So you've got some of your video is on this drive, some of your video is on that drive, and if this drive fails, you've lost all of it. That's what a traditional system is. So you've lost half of your footage.
Michael Bell:
You don't know where your footage is until you lose a drive. That's the other part about it
James Campbell:
Yeah, typically it's sequentially. So if you have two weeks on a hard drive, number one, and then you have two weeks on hard drive number two, and for whatever reason hard drive one just goes and says goodbye, and you're going to lose those first two weeks of footage. And so that's going to depend how big your hard drive is. You could be storing weeks, you could be storing months on a single hard drive. So with RAID it basically you have different levels that we will go into later, but you can set it to where you can lose a single hard drive and not lose a second of footage. You can set it to where you lose even two hard drives or multiple hard drives and not lose a single second of footage. So it's a really critical feature for footage retention essentially.
Ben Larue:
Awesome, awesome. So that's great. James, you gave us some context around what RAID is generally. Michael, you helped fill in some of the blanks around what NVRs traditionally do with hard drives and storage. Michael, help us understand what or of our NVRs, which ones support RAID do all of them? Maybe some of them?
Michael Bell:
Unfortunately it's not all of them, which in reality, some of our smaller systems, the four and the eight channel, it only has one drive. It only has space for two drives. So as far as the systems that are capable of doing RAID, they'll either have four hard drive bays or more. And that starts off with our Pro Series Admiral, so the Admiral 16 Pro, Admiral 32 Pro, and then all of our Imperials. So all the Imperials, no matter which one it is, they all have RAID options available. Now the RAID variations between the different models are different. I believe that the Admiral Pros will do RAID one and five, and then there are others available on the Imperial Series.
Matthew Nederlanden:
We'll cover what those are later.
Ben Larue:
Yeah. Absolutely. Absolutely. We'll cover the levels more in depth later. Great. And so before we move on to the next section, who should be thinking about RAID and using RAID? James real quick, give me the TLDR version of what is RAID?
James Campbell:
In a nutshell, if you care about your footage, you should be looking into an NVR that supports RAID and getting the hard drive capacity to support RAID because RAID is going to prevent you from losing weeks and sometimes even months of footage in the event of a hard drive failure.
Ben Larue:
Awesome. So we're going to move on to section two here. Who should use RAID, and when should they be using it? Matthew, do you want to run us through that?
Matthew Nederlanden:
Sure. I would say that for us, the people that we're going to recommend RAID to every single time is going to be if you have a storage and/or retention requirement from your state. So in other words, like the cannabis industry, or in some cases people in the northeast who sell cigarettes or liquor, sometimes they have requirements from the state where they have to store footage for let's say 30, 60, or 90 days. If that's one of your requirements, we're always going to recommend RAID because if one of your hard drive fails, you no longer meet that requirement. You get a regulator involved. You don't want to have that process happen. You want to avoid having the regulator say you did the wrong thing. So always you will use RAID, if you have a regulatory environment that is saying you need to store this footage.
Ben Larue:
That's awesome.
Matthew Nederlanden:
For X amount of days.
Ben Larue:
Absolutely, and you gave some examples there, but I'd love to isolate some of those examples and run through them.
Matthew Nederlanden:
Sure.
Ben Larue:
And this is really more open-ended for anybody to jump in here, but can we walk through some industries that might see these type of requirements? We mentioned one was cannabis, I think.
Michael Bell:
Yeah, we dealt a lot with the cannabis industry from support, of course. So cannabis definitely. I've worked with a couple of prisons on setting it up. Of course, they don't let me see their cameras or anything like that, but they have had questions about how exactly do you set that up and what steps to go through to make it work for their particular needs and stuff like that. I think a couple of cities, which they don't have a state regulation, but the city just wanted to make sure that their cameras are backed, their footage is backed up that way as well. And a couple of schools as well. Schools are pretty big on making sure that things are backed up.
Matthew Nederlanden:
Sometimes schools have a regulation of how long they have to store it.
Ben Larue:
Exactly, and I think to Matt's point earlier in regards to, and sorry James, I'll let you jump in in just a second, but to Matt's point earlier about if you have a regulatory requirement, audits happen in those industries all the time, very unannounced and can very often be surprises. And Michael alluded to earlier, you don't know a hard drive has failed until it's failed, until you would need to go pull that footage. And so I think that's something that stands out there and why we would always recommend RAID regulatory.
James Campbell:
Yeah, I was going to say, pharmacies are one that I've seen where they have a regulatory requirement where they have to restore a certain amount of footage, and somebody comes up there and says, "Hey, on 25 days ago, we need this clip here." And you realize like, oh, my hard drive's not working. Something went wrong. You could be in some hot water. And that's where RAID prevents that from happening. Just to clarify to you a little bit, the NVR will beep and all this kind of stuff if the hard drive fails, and so you do have some level of knowledge, but a lot of people ignore that. They may have the NVR in a different room that they never go into or stuff like that.
So you do want that level of backup. You have notifications available if a hard drive fails too, if you want to set that up. But yeah, I think even basically if you care about, like I mentioned, if you care about your footage, even if you don't have regulatory requirements, so going into liability issues if you're in manufacturing, if you're in warehousing and there's a workman's comp claim and your hard drive failed, or you're now in a situation where you don't have the footage you need to deal with the situation, so [inaudible 00:09:08]-
Matthew Nederlanden:
Yeah, would've definitely brought that up as my second big one. If you were in a scenario where it is likely that you will be, let's say, sued for medical neglect and you need to prove that something didn't happen, or even just modern HR environments can sometimes be prone to that sort of thing, how difficult is it to prove that you didn't create a hostile working environment for a particular class of protected peoples? Anything like that, you often need to have a lot of video data that you have available that you can go back to.
Ben Larue:
That's awesome. I think that helped provide a lot of context, and so now we understand what RAID is. Now we know what or who should be thinking about using it and implementing it. I want to dive into section three, and we're going to jump deep into the trenches here a little bit. So tighten your seatbelt. But James, earlier you talked about RAID and the different levels.
James Campbell:
Yeah.
Ben Larue:
Can we discuss this a little bit here and dive a little bit deeper?
James Campbell:
Yeah, yeah. So what RAID levels are, are basically what amount of... So RAID has actually two purposes. We didn't talk about the initial one, which is also a speed benefit and a read and write benefit. You don't really need that when it comes to security camera systems that there's not a benefit really there. So when we talk about it within the security camera ecosystem, we're always talking about the redundancy factor because that's what you care about. And so there are about 10 and more different levels of RAID that some will give you more speed, some will give you more redundancy. I'll just simplify it and say there's basically a couple different ones that people typically use within security cameras, and that's RAID... The most common one's RAID five, and-
Michael Bell:
Yeah, RAID five, maybe RAID six too.
James Campbell:
Yeah, RAID five is the most common one because basically what it does, and this is something we have to talk about here too, is RAID takes a hard drive. So when you put in... For example, RAID five requires at least three hard drives. So when you set that up and you put in three 10 terabyte drives, you're going to have 20 terabytes of capacity with a one disk failure. So if any one of those three disks fail, you're okay. The second one fails, and you're in trouble. So RAID five, you can have basically as minimum of three, and you can go up to 16 and still have RAID five. So it's one of the most popular ones because hard drives are, especially surveillance RAID drives, are pretty strong. They don't fail too often, but as long as you can respond within that one hard drive failure, RAID five's usually where you go.
Ben Larue:
So I definitely want to talk about the how we calculate RAID. I think that would be very useful for everybody. But I want to touch on something you mentioned there, some of the different levels, the most common being five. Michael, you mentioned six was pretty common too. What other ones do we see that are often used or...
James Campbell:
Somebody might set up a RAID one as well if it's like two hard drives, but it's a little less frequent. Typically the people who in our experience have used RAID are ones with larger NVRs that have eight hard drive capacities, 16, even 24 in part drive capacities. So, they're looking to maximize the amount of redundancy that they have while also not using all their space on redundancy too. There's a balancing act.
Ben Larue:
I gotcha. Yeah.
Michael Bell:
So one of the differences between five and six, he was talking about how RAID five gives you a drive that can fail. RAID six give you two drives that can fail. So it's just one of those things that, "Oh, I had two drives fail at all at the same time. My RAID five array is now done. I have to start from scratch." So if you had RAID six enabled, two drives can fail. But again with a 10 terabyte drives, that takes 20 terabytes of space out of the equation because now you're using those two drives as a backup kind of a sense. I guess.
Ben Larue:
An emergency system in a way.
Michael Bell:
A failure rate of two.
Ben Larue:
Right.
James Campbell:
Yeah, and I think that's actually a key point with RAID. So if RAID fails, if the array fails, you lose everything. You don't just lose what's on those two hard drives because of the way it functions technically. And I think a lot of people with RAID... Go ahead.
Ben Larue:
You're making me nervous, all this failure talk. Can we talk about how often hard drives even fail generally speaking? Maybe Michael, you can help us fill in.
Michael Bell:
Hard drives, I mean especially surveillance grade hard drives, they are built to last and for years. So the failure rate on hard drives, it's not zero. I will say that. It's not zero, but it's rare.
Ben Larue:
Gotcha.
Matthew Nederlanden:
That being said, you go stick a PC drive into a surveillance device, it's going to fail very soon.
Michael Bell:
Please don't.
Matthew Nederlanden:
It's not designed for that. A PC drive is like a... I like to say it's like a sprinter. It's really good at going very fast and then resting. And if you don't give it a rest, it will burn out. Where a surveillance drive, it's manufactured way differently. It's designed to keep heat low and to run all the time, never turn off. It's a long distance runner. It's really not going to fail very frequently at all. It's got some weird modifications on the larger sizes, like having helium inside of it to keep the temperature down. They were really designed differently than a PC drive. You stick a PC drive in, absolutely going to fail very quickly, nine months, something like that, not what you want to do. But if you're following our guidelines and using our product line for the surveillance grade hard drives, you're not going to have a very common failure rate. That being said, it does happen.
Ben Larue:
Right? And that's the main point I guess why we're talking about RAID, right? So I'm glad we covered that. I appreciate that.
James Campbell:
And I do want to bring up-
Ben Larue:
Go ahead, James.
James Campbell:
Sorry. In terms of RAID five or six, we're talking about, okay, hard drives very rarely fail, so why would you really ever need RAID six? So RAID six is two hard drives failure, you're okay, so why would you ever need that? Well, generally where people want RAID six isn't necessarily because they think two hard drives are going to fail at the exact same time and all that. It's because they may take weeks to actually go and replace that hard drive. So you have a hard drive failure, you are the regional IT guy for this company and you have a schedule you have to adhere to. The soonest you can go replace that hard drive might be six weeks.
So you want to make sure that you've got a little buffer there because don't always have the ability to immediately replace your hard drive. So that's where RAID six becomes pretty popular, where there's a doubt that, "Hey, am I going to be able to replace that hard drive in RAID five before another one potentially fails, if it even does." So, just wanted to bring that up and go back to RAID five or six because those are two the most popular.
Ben Larue:
Michael, you had a point that you were going to mention.
Michael Bell:
I already forgot what it was.
Ben Larue:
All right. Well.
Michael Bell:
I was agreeing with James. I was [inaudible 00:16:29]-
Ben Larue:
Awesome. So I'm so glad we were able to cover some of those failure concerns. I think it's important for everyone to understand as we are diving deeper into what RAID is and the intricacies of it, this word of failure will continue to come up. This word of redundancy and forms of backup, all these terms can sound fearful, but we're doing it in the lens of being proactive versus reactive. And that's really how SAW approaches surveillance.
Michael Bell:
I remember my point now, sorry.
Ben Larue:
Perfect. See.
Michael Bell:
Like everything, especially in the technology world, hard drives have a life cycle. So as good as they are and as long-lasting as they are, eventually they are going to fail. So having something like this, especially an NVR where all you do is you go to the system and you look for footage whenever you need it, so you're not constantly looking at these things. It can sit there for a few years, and you're not even have to look at footage. Who's to say the three to five year life cycle of that hard drive goes by, and you don't even think about it. And then all of a sudden, oh, there goes the drive and there goes footage you might have needed because you didn't have RAID set up.
Ben Larue:
Right.
James Campbell:
Yeah, I think that's... As far as hard drives, there's not an expiration date, so to speak, but the older they get, the increased likelihood of failure happens. I've got.. I collect Old Macs, and I've got Old Macs that have hard drives literally from the '80s that still work. But is that reasonable? Is that always going to happen? No. So you've got to understand that the longer they go on, the more likely a failure, the more redundancy matters.
Ben Larue:
Absolutely, right. And then even at that point, it's like what efficiency? Are they working to their fullest degree, right?
James Campbell:
Yeah.
Ben Larue:
But yeah, totally. And I told you, I warned everybody, you better buckle your seat belts. We dove deep pretty quick. So I want to circle back really fast to the calculation part though. How do we even balance and calculate out RAID in hard drive usage and the different protection levels that you might want to look into?
James Campbell:
So there are calculators. I think we'll have one on our website here after this video that you simply put in the amount of disk you have and the size of each disc. One thing with RAID, which we can talk about in the consideration section as well, but you can't mix and match drive sizes. So you can't do two terabyte, then a 10 terabyte, then a 14 terabyte. You have to do all the same uniform size with RAID. That's one of the key things.
Michael Bell:
Can I interject there? You can, but it's going to follow the lowest capacity hard drive.
James Campbell:
Oh yeah, yeah.
Michael Bell:
So yes, it will work, but your two terabyte drive is going to be the maximum space that your eight terabyte drive is going to be recognizing, so all that space is gone.
James Campbell:
Yeah.
Ben Larue:
It would be counter to... Yeah. Okay.
Matthew Nederlanden:
That's kind of a waste of money.
Ben Larue:
Yeah.
Michael Bell:
Yes.
James Campbell:
Don't do it.
Ben Larue:
Right.
James Campbell:
So you would put in, and I'll show here on the screen, you put in the amount that you need, how many disks you have, what size the disks are, and then there'll be RAID types. And so you select RAID five. So I've got a calculator here. I've got eight disk, 10 terabytes each disc, and I've got RAID five as my RAID type. So I hit calculate and it tells me my capacity is 70 terabytes. So it's using that one disk for the redundancy. And my fault tolerance is a one drive failure. So that means that one drive fails, I'm good.
Now if I do that with RAID six, that is going to reduce the capacity to 60 terabytes now, but now I've got a fault tolerance of two drives. So when it comes down to calculating it, please reach out to us if you have questions, use the calculator, but it really is going to depend on how much capacity you need for retaining the amount of footage you need as well as what level of redundancy you want. Whether again, most people RAID five or RAID six is the main option, but this is going to come down to what redundancy with how much footage and your budget for that hard drive basically.
Ben Larue:
Definitely. And so that's how we calculate RAID. But I guess I didn't even cover one other thing that I wanted to mention. If you weren't sure, how could you find out what RAID you should use?
James Campbell:
That's a good question. You can reach out and ask us, but it really comes down to, if you're not aware of what really RAID is, look at RAID five and RAID six. Those are the two ones that you typically or 95% of our customers probably use. And your question is, do you want to deal with one fall tolerance or do you want two fall tolerance, and do you have the space in the NVR to deal with that? Because you may need to record, say, 90 days of footage on hand and taking up two hard drive slots for that, RAID six for example, may be a bit of a deal breaker for it. So that's the factor you have to factor in how much hard drive capacity your NVR has, how much redundancy you want, and whether or not the NVR has a capacity to do it.
Ben Larue:
That's a great point, and you hit a couple notes there like redundancy and purchasing power, ability to afford these type of things, and if that's a non-starter or not. So it sounds like there's some considerations, nonetheless, that you have to consider when it comes to deciding what RAID level you might be choosing, and then ultimately how you balance and calculate out the amount of storage you want or don't need, all of that stuff. But on the note of redundancy, how does RAID compare to other forms of redundancy? And maybe we could walk through maybe only a couple examples of what other redundancy options might look like.
Michael Bell:
It's... Sorry, I don't... It's different. So your RAID on your NVR is backing up the footage within the NVR itself.
Ben Larue:
Okay. That's a key point I want to note on.
Michael Bell:
Right.
Ben Larue:
That's a key point. So the RAID is happening within the actual NVR device itself.
Michael Bell:
Right. And you can also have a redundant drive for maybe one or two cameras that is copying to the RAID as normal, like all the other cameras. But maybe you have one or two cameras that you want a redundancy on a single drive outside of the RAID that is just storing footage all the time. We see this a lot with the grow ops and things like that, dispensaries, because they have to have certain cameras looking at a certain thing that has longer footage or footage that definitely will not go anywhere if maybe the RAID array failed, they have that backup for that one or two cameras that they needed. But then there's also things like offloading it to a NAS or expanding on your current footage that the NVR has through a network attached storage device, either making a redundancy there or expanding the total amount of footage that the NVR is able to see or keep.
James Campbell:
Yeah, I think to back out a little bit, so when Michael's talking about the redundancy option, on our NVRs, you have the ability to set a drive as redundant. And so it's kind of similar in concept to array, but it's not technically... Doesn't function the same way in the backend essentially. But the actual end product is kind of similar. So for example, we mentioned that the eight channel doesn't support RAID itself, but it does still support the redundant hard drive option. So you can select, make one hard drive redundant, and then you are essentially mirroring those two hard drives in a way. So this does give you a little bit more flexibility in RAID. RAID is doing everything and anything. Like you mentioned, you can do one camera, if you want to, redundant. You can do all of them, if you want to, individually.
So you have a little bit more customization there, but it doesn't work... That redundancy option doesn't work quite as well when you have a lot of hard drives because with... Imagine you have eight hard drives, and you can only set a certain amount of them to be redundant. So if... Let's just say you set one hard drive and that eight to fail, you're only backing up one hard drive's worth of footage. So if another one fails, it gets very complicated, but if one of them fails, you're losing footage. Whereas RAID, you don't lose any footage at all. So there's some flexibility with the redundancy option. It's good for smaller systems I think, but I'd always recommend RAID for anything above three hard drives, honestly.
Ben Larue:
Gotcha.
Michael Bell:
Yeah, you mentioned something about going from the eight drives and stuff like that. I've also talked to a couple of customers where that was a deal breaker going with an eight bay system on a 64 channel Imperial to where we had to move them over to the Imperial 64 16 S, which has I believe it's 16 bays.
James Campbell:
Yes.
Michael Bell:
Because when they were going to set up RAID six within the Imperial 64, that would've taken two drives, and they needed more in total footage or storage. So we had to move them over to the Imperial 64 16 S that had more bays.
James Campbell:
Yep.
Ben Larue:
That's good. And so back to my original question, if we were to stack RAID up against another form of redundancy, like a NAS device, let's just say, how would they compare against each other? Is RAID better than a NAS device or would you rather have a NAS device than setting up RAID?
Michael Bell:
You could set a NAS device with RAID, [inaudible 00:26:15].
Ben Larue:
Hey, there you go.
Matthew Nederlanden:
They basically can protect against different things. A NAS device is going to really help you if you're worried about someone breaking in and stealing your recorder. If somebody breaks in and steals your recorder, doesn't matter. You got a backup inside the recorder with RAID, they stole the recorder, it's gone. And so a NAS device is going to help with that problem. On the flip side, a NAS device is not really going to help with a hardware failure with a hard drive going down. You're going to have a second copy of that, but you still lost the first version, and you still have an awkward experience trying to watch that footage. Is that correct?
James Campbell:
Yeah, I think... Yeah, they're almost two different reasons for existing, I think a NAS is a decent... So the maximum capacity you actually can even have on a NAS with our systems, I think it's 30 terabytes or 40 terabytes. Let me actually bring that up real quick.
Michael Bell:
I think it's 40, but you can also set a RAID in that, like a RAID five to have a redundant drive.
James Campbell:
Yeah. On the NAS itself will support a RAID because RAID isn't just for security camera stuff. It's on servers. It's on PCs. People use it all across industries, and it's the same tech, but obviously we use it for redundancy in this field. So you are eliminating capacity on a NAS too. But like I mentioned, it's really hard to explain, but basically if you have 80 terabytes in the NVR, for example, and 40 terabytes on the NAS, you're only backing up basically half your footage on that. So in the event that multiple hard drives fail within that NVR, you may still lose footage if you're just using a NAS in that scenario.
Ben Larue:
And in that scenario too, it's not like the... The NVR wouldn't know to all of a sudden start writing onto the NAS device only. Right?
James Campbell:
Well, yeah, it would still even if a hard drive fails. So I think it's important to know the difference between backup and redundancy for some situations. So sometimes that word's used interchangeably, but they do mean somewhat different things. So when you say backup, most people assume that at midnight it goes and it sends footage over to this NAS, which is a network attached hard drive by the way. And whereas redundancy is more of at all times it's doing one and two, one-two, one-two, and is backing up in real time, is basically the difference between redundancy and maybe backup. So the NAS is redundant still. It is recording both through the internal hard drives and to the network attached storage at about the same time. So in the event, let's just say you only have one hard drive in your NVR for simplicity purposes, it's still going to record to that NAS, even if that internal hard drive fails, even though it's redundant because it's not doing a scheduled backup.
So it's not pulling that footage off the internal hard drive and then sending it over. It's doing it one-to-one. One last thing I do want to bring up about NAS, and this is about RAID, but I do want to bring it up. Is on a NAS, you do have to consider network. So it is going through a network. So if your network goes down, that NAS is not going to be redundantly recording too, and it's not... Because it is redundantly recording and not doing a scheduled backup kind of thing, whatever's missed during that timeframe with the NAS, if your network's down for eight hours, all eight hours of that footage is not going to be on that NAS.
So that is a consideration with NAS versus RAID to factor in. And then the last thing with NAS too is you do have to consider... I believe it uses actually the outgoing bit rate of the NVR as well. So when it's connecting, when it's sending that data to a NAS, it's using the outgoing bit rate. So another factor, if you have a lot of people streaming the system that you may want to consider that when you're looking at a NAS, so...
Matthew Nederlanden:
It's basically another viewer.
Ben Larue:
Yeah.
James Campbell:
Yeah.
Matthew Nederlanden:
Architecturally the same thing is happening, just no one's seeing the file.
Michael Bell:
Even more actually because a viewer, thankfully they can look at Substream and third stream. This is going to be mainstream saving to that drive and it's going to take a lot of data.
Matthew Nederlanden:
Yeah, this is everybody looking at every camera at the full quality.
James Campbell:
And fortunately we did just upgrade our NVRs to have killer outgoing bit rate. They're really high now. So it's a little less of a concern than I would say-
Ben Larue:
But still a concern nonetheless.
James Campbell:
Maybe six months ago, but it's still something to factor in, especially if you do have multiple people looking at your system.
Ben Larue:
Okay.
Michael Bell:
And that's going to be taking data traffic on your network as well, so yeah.
Ben Larue:
There you go. There's another consideration. And on that note, I think Michael, we should use considerations as a perfect segue into the fourth section, which is what are some of the main considerations about RAID, maybe from a support standpoint? I don't know if you could walk us through some of that stuff.
Michael Bell:
I guess the biggest thing is that RAID arrays can be... I don't know if fragile is a good word for it. They can break and fail, and you have to rebuild them, and you have the chance of losing all of your data, and something like power loss. If the power just goes out and you do not have this on a UPS backup, that can break your RAID array, and then all of your footage is just gone. So having something like a UPS that is on this system, powering it with clean power, that would help out a lot. Anytime you do a shut-down, you don't want to yank the cable out of the wall or anything, you want to actually go through the proper steps, go to the menu, do shut down and go that way because... What do you think, James? Fragile, is that a good word for a RAID array?
James Campbell:
Yeah. Probably not fragile, but it's... You do have to be considerate of it. It is a software function. So there is something called hardware RAIDs, which are... I don't know about the rest of the tech world, but I know it's sort of going away in the security camera industry. I think it's going away in the rest of the world too, honestly, but-
Matthew Nederlanden:
It's definitely going away everywhere.
James Campbell:
Where you actually need a physical card to plug these in. And so those are a little bit more resistant because they were actually a physical card and hardware base, whereas a software base, it's keeping some kind of database that tells them where all these footage pieces are stored throughout the entire array. So like any software, if you don't take care of it, it can corrupt. And when it corrupts, that array could go away, and you could lose all your footage. So like everything Michael said there, a battery backup. If you're using RAID, you should 100% be using a battery backup. I wouldn't recommend using... If you don't have one, don't do it because it will eventually corrupt if you have one of those brown out style situations. So that's the big thing.
Michael Bell:
One thing about that that I'd like to tack on. I mean SCW, we don't carry UPS's ourselves, but my team or I think most of the sales team now, I think they've been educated on total wattage for systems and stuff like that. We can always provide max wattage calculations for your system, whether that is just covering the recorder and its internal hard drives, or if you need your entire system calculated out. We can get you the max wattage and help you calculate what size UPS you would need for your particular system. That's something that we actually do quite often to help people out with because it's pretty important. Especially cameras, man, you don't want your cameras to go down any time.
James Campbell:
Another thing is plan ahead of time if you think that... Because it's not very easy to necessarily go and add hard drives to a RAID after the fact, after it's already been established. So you do want to make sure that you're planning RAID in the early stages of building out your system. So that's another factor.
Ben Larue:
That's a great question, if I can dive deeper on that. What if I set up a RAID and I need to add more cameras? How does that work?
James Campbell:
So that's where you have to... So you can set up multiple different RAID arrays in the NVR, but then you're using multiple.... So for example, if you have... You need to add three more hard drives. You either have to rebuild that initial RAID and potentially lose footage, or you can build a second array, another RAID five, and then you'd have basically two sets of RAID in the NVR. It does get a little complicated as far as factoring that in. So that's why it is always important. You probably want to go overkill with your storage on RAID, so that way if you do have plans, and, "Hey, maybe I need 10 more cameras in the future and that's going to stretch my current capacity," make sure you're planning that ahead. So that way it's always better to have overkill when it comes to storage than under kill. And so yeah, just plan it out. Make sure not just what you're doing now, but maybe what you're going to be doing a year from now too.
Ben Larue:
Right, right. Rather nice to have now than not have it and need it down the road. Right? Absolutely. So let's wrap this up. I think it would be nice for us to go around each person on the panel here, 30 seconds or less. Give us your final thoughts on RAID. Who wants to start?
Michael Bell:
My final thoughts on RAID would be you bought this system for a reason, and the footage is important if not legally required for whatever job or facility this is installed in. It's very important to make sure that you do not lose any footage at all because you never know when it's going to help. So that would be my final thoughts on that, I think. Yeah.
Ben Larue:
That's great. That's great. That's great. Matt, what are your thoughts? Final thoughts?
Matthew Nederlanden:
Losing footage always makes you look like a bad guy. It makes you look like you deleted it, like you had something to hide. So you want to avoid that scenario anytime possible, if you're facing some sort of legal threat or you need to produce this. You don't want to go to a judge and say, "I don't have it. I said I had it, but I don't." That's terrible. You do not want that to happen.
James Campbell:
Yeah, I think I'll wrap that up with agreeing with what Michael and Matthew just said. Your footage is one of the most important things on a security camera system. So the additional cost of the hard drives and potentially the things you need to do with it are pretty small in comparison to a situation where you realize you need a piece of footage, and it's not there. The minute you have a hard drive failure with that, whether that's three years from now or 30 years from now, you're going to be like, "Man, I'm glad I invested in RAID." So that's my final little bit.
Michael Bell:
Hey, I have a new catchphrase, guys. With your RAID array, I can help you catch the bad guy. Or SCW support can help you catch the bad guy.
Ben Larue:
Yes.
Michael Bell:
As long as it didn't get overwritten, please calculate how much footage you need.
James Campbell:
Yeah.
Michael Bell:
How much hard drive space you need.
Ben Larue:
That's right, absolutely. And with all that said, I think this is a perfect place to put a pin in it. Thanks so much for joining us today for this In The Trenches round table. If you'd like to learn more about RAID and some of the specifics of the things that we covered, of course, check out all the links to some of the resources in the description below and jump on our website, get in contact with us. Our support or sales team would be happy to help. Thanks so much again for tuning in, and we will see you next week.
Michael Bell:
Bye guys.
James Campbell:
Bye.