Banana Pi suitability for ZM? or other micro computer?

[ScottBouch]

Hi guys,

Looking at changing my server as it's having a few issues, and is way over-powered for what I need anyway - I recently tried moving my simple website on to a raspberry Pi and had great success wit it. There are a few services on my server that I'll be moving to independent hardware, ideally a series of Raspberry Pi's or similar.

The old server currently runs Zoneminder, I'm aiming for low power consumption, so considered the Banana Pi for ZM.

I can only find a couple of threads where people have tried it, and seem to have had some success, but there's not enough information to make an informed decision on it with current releases of ZM, and what OS release to use...

I'd be interested to know if I'd be able to do motion detection or not, as I read that'd be an impossibility with a Raspberry Pi, but permanent recording is ok.

I like the idea of the Banana Pi as it has support for SATA, so I can tie a big HDD to it, and it has fairly good processing power compared to a Raspberry Pi.

Any other low powered computers recommended for use?

Cheers, Scott.

[iconnor]

I am currently using a pi3 to do 1080p with motion detection at 2fps. zma uses about 20% processor.

Long term we may leverage the hardware h264 decode/encode... but for now it's still quite capable.

I don't think there is really enough ram to put the database on it as well. I have the db on another machine.

[ScottBouch]

Thanks dude..

So effectively, for a simple install, it's probably not feasible for a PI to run the whole show...

Thanks, Scott

[bogdanx]

I am wondering why the specs on the RPi 3 or Banana Pi are not enough, compared to a Synology with Armada 800 MHz CPU and 215-512 MB of ram. RPi has 2 GB and quad core 1.6 GHz CPU.

Or this is because zoneminder is not as resource efficient as DSM?

[iconnor]

It is possible to do. It will require some tweaking that is all.

[mrbill]

I'm looking at something similar. I think the issue with RPI is the storage I/O. If you put the DB on another machine, it is probably OK - but that kind of defeats the point in my mind.

I'm thinking that a fan-less x86 compatible machine might be better, but that is not necessarily low power, nor inexpensive, though it will have a smaller footprint.

If you want to use a low power single-board computer, I think having a SATA interface is pretty much mandatory. Coupled with an SSD, it should be fairly low power too.

I'm think of trying the Banana Pi too - or perhaps the one of the Cubieboard SBC's.