I never did a proper review of my new Zoneminder Rig which is based on an older Dual Socket Xeon Proc with 4 cores each.
Currently this box has Dual Xeon Quad Core E5606 CPUs and 12GB of Registered DDR3 RAM
It is hard to tell in this picture below, but it has 4 Hard disks and a DVD drive
- 1 4TB WD Purple (DVR HD) drive
- 1 3TB WD Green Drive
- 1 1TB Toshiba 2.5″ drive
- 1 256GB Samsung SSD
It runs pretty quite despite having 6 fans to cool it down (not including any in the power supply) Even the RAM has a custom baffling and fan
Speaking of the power supply, it is in a neat easily replaceable module, but makes me wonder if these things fail enough they have to make them easily replaceable. I should get a spare.
The connectors were two older PS2 style keyboard and mouse which totally works with my KVM. There were an ample amount of USB2 connectors, no USB3 connectors, I added a dual PCI-E Gig Ethernet card as well. Finally today I added the BNC video adapters and can serve a total of 8 BNC cameras.
One cool surprise was the NVidia Video card which can do hardware H.264 decoding which can improve ffmpeg performance which Zoneminder uses.
Unfortunately one of the RAM chips I have is bad, I am on the hunt to replace it. Keeps rebooting my PC
Other than the bad RAM, it is handling the Zoneminder load allright
I have more than 20 cameras, 5 of them 1080P cameras with motion detection turned on. Note the load is 4.94, I have 8 CPUs so I have room to spare. Also the RAM is only using 53% without any tweaking.
I am happy with this rig, I think I sunk $500 in to it. There is room to expand, I can go to 24GB of registered RAM or 48GB unbufferred, I can go to 3GHz 6 core if CPU became an issue.
One thing to note is this thing is HEAVY, and where it sits, it will be difficult to steal.