I’ve been using zoneminder with some POE IP cameras for a long time. It works pretty well, but the interface looks like it’s from the 90’s. I just wish it would do object detection so it wouldn’t send alerts because of shadows or a spider crawling across the lens.

My cameras have been out in the weather for over a decade and are starting to get a bit flaky. I will probably upgrade to some 4K analog cameras and a DVR that can do object detection. Modern IP cameras still don’t support gigabit and I don’t want any more 100M stuff on my network. I don’t trust WiFi for anything security related because it’s too easy to jam.

SATA SSDs are still more than fast enough to saturate a 2.5G ethernet connection. Some HDDs can even saturate 2.5G on large sequential reads and writes. The higher speed from M.2 NVMe drives isn’t very useful when they overheat and thermal throttle quickly. You need U.2 or EDSFF drives for sustained high speed transfers.

My server with 8 hard drives uses about 60 watts and goes up to around 80 under heavy load. The firewall, switch, access points and modem use another 50-60 watts.

I really need upgrade my server and firewall to something about 10 years newer, it would reduce my power consumption quite a bit and I would have a lot more runtime on UPS.

I use the Unifi access points. They work well and are fairly inexpensive. The management software can change settings on all of them at once, which is really handy if you have several.