Zoneminder has been chugging away now for several months on the following hardware/configuration:
2x AMD Operton 1.8GHz
Iwill DK8X Motherboard (multi PCI bus)
4x500GB drives, RAID 10, 1TB effective space for events (started as 250GB drives, recently upgraded)
3Ware 8506-8 as events storage controller
2x 8 port Provideo BT878 card
1GB RAM
Currently supporting 14 non-network cameras doing capture at 4fps on each, a mix of color and b/w. Filesystem is ReiserFS for the event storage, linux in use is Gentoo with a 2.6 kernel. The events are stored on the RAID 10 array, while the database sits on the system array, which is a (software) mirrored setup. The events array uses SATA disks, but they tend to drop and fail much faster than I'm comfortable with. Striking a balance with cheap drives in RAID 10 solves the problem - the failed drives always have an online partner. RAID 5 did not work as well in that regard.
It hasn't been easy arriving at this point - the initial attempts at constructing a box that would hold this number of cameras was touchy. To support this many cameras, a motherboard with multiple PCI bus option is a must - elsewise you swamp the bus between all the camera traffic, hard disk traffic, and whatnot. When in doubt, throw money at the problem.
I've effectively duplicated the above system for a second installation, minus the second processor and with a much lower number of cameras and available drive space.
So far, we've caught multiple cases of employee theft, falsification of punch time records, two cases of car radio theft in the parking lots (one of which was very clear and was turned over to police), and at least one embarrasing circumstance that can only fall under the category of "other".
If I had to do it over again:
1) I'd purchase the multiple bus motherboard first thing
2) I'd leave off the second proc - it doesn't need it
3) I'd go straight to RAID 10, never monkeying with RAID 5
4) I'd never start in the first place
5) Hardware is cheaper than brains - several things when I got started "should have" worked, but proved less than effective when some other area of the system was overstressed.
Along the way, I believe I've run into every bug from every package associated with ZM, and with ZM itself. The forums have been a tremendous resource in solving my problems. A big thank you to all of you.
