Rpi3/NAS/old laptop for cctv storage/motion detection

Hi All

Trying to work out what my best option is. I’m trying to keep costs to a minimum as I’ve got various disks/drives I can reuse.

I’ve got a HP microserver running a Debian VM with motioneye for motion detection and recording, however I feel that this is going to use too much power being on 24/7 (the microserver is running win 8.1 as I use it as a media pc occasionally)

It boils down to which is going to use the least power and be able to perform motion detection from my 2 1080p IP cameras. Options are:
Rpi3 running motioneye software and writing data to a portable hdd.
Synology/QNAP NAS and use the inbuilt surveillance station
Reprovision an old Dell Vostro laptop and use ispy for cctv software.

Don’t mind spending a bit initially if it makes sense for longer term power savings but the microserver is using about 55w currently which soon adds up.

Any other alternatives I’ve missed welcome!

I'd suggest surfing Ebay for used or refurbished SFF barebones machines with a low-power chip.

For example;

https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/ASUS-UN42-M016M/202105376303

Quote:

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Originally Posted by DDY

I'd suggest surfing Ebay for used or refurbished SFF barebones machines with a low-power chip.

For example;

https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/ASUS-UN42-M016M/202105376303

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Looks like a pretty good option as can put linux on it and run some of the services am doing currently. Should have a spare drive kicking around and memory is fairly reasonable. Has anyone got any feedback on Synology Surveillance Station? Might be able to replace a chunk of the microserver content on a NAS and I notice that Synology also has openVPN support so can potentially consolidate a few boxes

Can you get a lower power CPU for the microstation, or possibly underclock the thing?

Disc drives take about 7W each, how many do you have?

I'm wondering how low you can realistically get this. If you spend £200 and end up still using 45W then I don't see you getting your money back.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by DanceswithUnix

Can you get a lower power CPU for the microstation, or possibly underclock the thing?

Disc drives take about 7W each, how many do you have?

I'm wondering how low you can realistically get this. If you spend £200 and end up still using 45W then I don't see you getting your money back.

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It's an inbuilt CPU on the Microserver. Currently have 4 spinning disks and an SSD within it. Not sure about underclocking as its a fairly low spec cpu (AMD Turion II Neo N40L (1.5 Ghz) K625) and it can struggle under load at times. I've seen that the 2 bay Synology 216j NAS units only seem to consume about 15w under load with 2 spinning disks in (which equates to £60/year saving at current energy prices).
The other alternative was an i5 vostro 3550 laptop I found lying about, seems to pull 50 watts 50 under full load but hopefully with the CPU being fairly decent in the first instance and not requiring the screen on all the time will help bring that down to around 15 (which it was while idle). Thinking if I just install the minimum OS possible to create a linux VM to run the motioneye sw off which should hopefully keep power use to a minimum.

The old vostro seems to have done the trick. Currently daily usage is around 0.16kWh which seems more than suitable. Not sure about the long term suitability of leaving a laptop on 24/7 but certainly solves the issue in the short term and I doubt I'll be able to find something with similar processing ability (i5, 2410m), memory (4GB) and storage (320GB) for minimal purchase costs and I would think there would be minimal additional power savings.
Really liked the idea of the NAS but being limited to 2 free camera licenses was a bit of a pain (£40 for an additional license is a massive rip off!)