Review on 💾 Diskless Synology NVR1218: 2-Bay Network Video Recorder by Kevin Abner

Bought this almost a year ago to pair with an Amcrest 4K camera for my front yard. I was familiar with the basic setup of a Synology system and it's no different than setting up a Synology NAS - it was very easy and only took about 30 minutes. Since I only wanted to use one camera with it, I set up two logical cameras, both accessing the same physical camera. One operates in 24x7 mode and records sub-streams (640x480) continuously, while the other is event-triggered and records events in 4K. I've also connected this NVR to a WISE/4060 connected to an IR motion detector, allowing me to use both video and IR motion detection for events. The processor only runs consistently at almost 25% in a 4K stream with 10 fps. The optimal settings I have found for the camera are 4K resolution, 10 fps, variable bitrate, best quality, stream limit 10240 and frame interval 10. Please note that I have to adjust these manually on the camera itself since the NVR is software, the software will always use the wrong settings. Initially I tried running 4K continuous recording/motion detection and it was using 55-60% of the CPU for just one thread. I can't say this NVR will run more than one 4K camera simultaneously because I've never tested it, but it seems to have enough CPU for three 4K streams just to record events if you want to tweak it. Disabling video event detection and using an IR detector with an Advantech WISE or ADAM I/O device can further reduce CPU usage, resulting in better video recording. The new version of Surveillance Station software allows automatic switching of the low-resolution stream to a higher-resolution stream for event recording, so my dual logic camera setup is probably no longer needed. Overall I am very happy with this setup and am only deducting one star as it only has one ethernet port which limits network flexibility.