Always-On Storage for IP Camera Systems

Video surveillance storage has a uniquely demanding write profile: hundreds of cameras writing simultaneously, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, with mandatory retention periods that can span 30, 60, or 90 days. Most general-purpose NAS was not designed for this workload — random-write-optimized file systems perform poorly under the sustained sequential write load that surveillance generates, and consumer or SMB NAS appliances lack the capacity and reliability for enterprise deployments.

TrueNAS OpenZFS pools can be tuned specifically for surveillance workloads: large block sizes, sequential-write optimization, and spinning disk arrays that deliver high sustained write throughput at a cost-per-TB that makes 90-day 4K retention economically feasible. And because OpenZFS checksums every block at write time, a recording that appears intact in the NVR is actually intact — not silently corrupted on disk and unrecoverable at the moment of a security incident investigation.