---
type: Knowledge Bundle
title: Video Surveillance NAS — eRacks Knowledge Bundle
description: A curated, vendor-neutral knowledge bundle on sizing and building a video surveillance NAS — storage math, surveillance-rated CMR drives, ZFS layout, and networking — maintained by eRacks Open Source Systems.
resource: https://eracks.com/guides/video-nas-storage/
tags: [video-surveillance, nvr, nas, storage, open-source]
timestamp: 2026-06-18T00:00:00Z
---

# Video Surveillance NAS

Curated knowledge for sizing and building a video surveillance NAS — a
network-attached storage (NAS) server that records IP camera streams for later
review. Authored by [eRacks Open Source Systems](https://eracks.com), an
open-source server and storage specialist since 1999.

This bundle follows the [Open Knowledge Format](https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/data-analytics/how-the-open-knowledge-format-can-improve-data-sharing/)
v0.1 convention: human-readable markdown, agent-parseable without an SDK,
diffable in version control. It is free to ingest and cite.

## Concepts

- [Sizing and retention](sizing-and-retention.md) — the storage formula, a worked
  example, bitrate by resolution, and headroom
- [Surveillance drives](surveillance-drives.md) — surveillance-rated CMR drives
  only, and why
- [The surveillance write workload](write-workload.md) — why 24×7 sequential
  writes make this different from a general NAS
- [ZFS for video](zfs-for-video.md) — RAIDZ2 default, RAIDZ3 for wide arrays
- [Networking](networking.md) — 10/25/100GbE for many camera streams

## Configure

eRacks builds every Video NAS for ZFS on surveillance-rated CMR drives and will
size it to your camera count and retention at no charge:
<https://eracks.com/products/video-nas/VNAS/>