quote:
There's this guy, the crosstalk solutions guy, "the hook up" has done a couple tests, and the lawrence solutions guy focuses mostly on the hardware and software, not so much the image quality and real-world testing.

I watch videos from those guys too.

Let me know what you think about the CK2+ as a NVR. I might wind up going that route as well. My problem with it (other than no RAID) is that it only accepts 2.5" drives which limits your upgrade choices. Surveillance/NAS drives only come in 3.5" and large capacity 2.5" drives have a higher premium and usually only sold by 3rd parties on Amazon or Newegg for some reason.

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Posted by Korkstand

Member since Nov 2003

28731 posts

Posted on 1/5/21 at 10:31 pm to gpburdell

quote:
Let me know what you think about the CK2+ as a NVR. I might wind up going that route as well. My problem with it (other than no RAID) is that it only accepts 2.5" drives which limits your upgrade choices. Surveillance/NAS drives only come in 3.5" and large capacity 2.5" drives have a higher premium and usually only sold by 3rd parties on Amazon or Newegg for some reason.

Yes, choices for hard drives are limited. I also don't get the 5TB max on the CK+, but whatever. It is concerning that there is just one spinning disk saving my recordings, but for basic non-mission-critical home surveillance, I think it's fine. Just go in expecting it to fail at some point. It doesn't seem much more expensive to get the rack mount UNVR for $300 and get cheaper and more durable storage than the CK+, but then you need a place to put it and will probably need a cabinet or rack and it's loud and power hungry. The CK+ is quiet, tiny, and powered via PoE. You can hide it literally anywhere around the house so that it's not an easy target for a burglar.

My CK+ came in this afternoon, so I've had a little while to play with it. I'm still getting a feel for the modect settings, so for now I've got the sensitivity turned way up and it's generating a lot of small events (outside, bugs, etc). One thing I've noticed, which I guess should be expected, is it takes it a while to generate an event with all the timeline thumbnails and such. The footage is obviously recorded right away, but it takes probably 5 or 6 minutes before it appears on the timeline as a scrubbable timelapse preview. No big deal, as you're typically going to be reviewing events from hours or days ago on the timeline.

I only have 1 camera hooked up right now for testing, so I'm not really stressing it out performance-wise. It does have a cpu gauge, which I have not seen exceed 2%. Scrubbing through the timeline is about as slick as I expected. The "magnitude" and length of each event is obvious, thumbnails are produced at various points within the event (long events might have multiple thumbnails which you can jump to), pinch to zoom works well on the timeline, and it just kind of works so far. The web and mobile UI are very similar, and I don't know if I could imagine a more intuitive way to locate a particular event or get a quick summary of the day's happenings. You can download selected events, or you can set start and end times and it will generate a clip that way. On the mobile app you have the option to download clips at full framerate, or a timelapse version which looks to be adjustable from 10 minutes of video per second to 60 minutes per second. Pretty cool, and they generate and download in seconds.

I'm not blown away by it, but the things it does it seems to do very well. Once I get it installed on site and see how it performs with more cams, I'll report back for those interested.

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Posted by Korkstand

Member since Nov 2003

28731 posts

Posted on 1/19/21 at 10:36 am to gpburdell

Alright, so I've got some time in with Protect at a relatively busy location. It's got 8 cameras recording always (and events generated on motion) running on a Cloud Key Plus with 5TB Seagate spinning drive.

I'll start by saying the spinning HDD is absolutely the bottleneck by FAR, but for home use I'm more than certain it will work absolutely fine. For reference, these 8 cameras are seeing ~6,000 motion events per day, roughly 10-15 seconds each, concentrated over 12 hours and almost no motion for the other 12 hours. If my math is correct, the CK+ is generating 2 minutes worth of motion event metadata (thumbnails, timelapse, alerts, etc) for every 1 minute of real time, on average. This can sometimes spike to a 5 or 6 multiple for maybe an hour at busy times. During these times, the UI can be sluggish, but it seems to be strictly due to the hard drive limitations. Even so, the timelapse feature is usually surprisingly responsive. That said, I will likely upgrade this location to the UNVR, which I am certain will eliminate the hard drive bottleneck. The little 2.5" HDD can't compete with the full size 3.5" models. An SSD in the CK+ would probably also drastically improve performance, and after researching newer ones I don't think write endurance should be a problem for a few years, so that would be a good option too.

Overall I'm pretty pleased with Protect, and I haven't experienced any of the problems other users report. It has just worked, though it has only been about 2 weeks.

I managed to snag a G3 Instant when they were briefly in stock last week, and it should arrive today! I think once these become generally available, they're going to sell like crazy at $30. Still not quite competitive with Wyze, especially considering you need to buy a recorder, but I think it's a good value considering there are no sub fees for 24/7 recording and your footage isn't sent to the cloud. Especially as a supplement to an existing Protect setup, they're kind of a no-brainer in a lot of situations.

This post was edited on 1/19/21 at 10:55 am

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