Need Recommendations On A NAS For Handling 160 IP Cameras

What VMS are you using? 

Did you consider using a product that was built/designed for video storage?  I am just wondering if the price point for a solution from Seneca (or others?) would be a better solution?  I see a ton of issues in video systems due to using products/solutions that are not purpose built for video surveillance.

Seneca Storage

Side note: these issues can also be due to a Frankenstein system that kept growing...it was ok at first however year after year things got ugly.... 

Having only a single power supply and not being expandable would be a deal breaker for me.  Also 16 TB (assuming two are for backup) could run out pretty quickly with 160 3MP cameras, what is your goal for retention time? And are you only recording on motion?

for that many cameras I would choose something more robust and with more expandability (and redundant power supplies) like this QNAP box. It also already has 10G fiber ports and can do iSCSI

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07DWCFS8P/ref=psdc_13436301_rv_t3_B071W8DLMR

Only 32 TB for a 160 3MP camera?  Even without raid I don't think you will get more than 1 week recording on standard settings.

Check out Spectralogic.  They have a 2U 90TB NAS that is affordable and if you need more they start with a 4U box that scales to peta-bytes.  One downside is that they are not fully fault tolerant (no dual controllers) but positive is that they come with 10G built in.

https://spectralogic.com/products/spectra-verde/

I cannot in any way believe that a prosumer-class NAS with an Intel Celeron CPU and 2GB of RAM is going to show any sign of reasonable performance with that many cameras. If you are going to be responsible for supporting that at a customer site you are way better off with a purpose-built solution. Panasonic has NVR systems so I'd consider a turnkey solution. You can still supply your own NVR if you want, but look at the platforms their NVRs are built on and use that as a guide to building your own (min. CPU is Core i5 and RAM 8GB). Or, as another poster suggested, have a look at Seneca.

If the NAS is only going to be used as a file share for the VMS for archived footage, and not actually running the VMS or saving live recordings, then and only then it could be good enough.

I don't know about your VMS, but the way Milestone does it (optionally), is that it saves recordings to one location (eg local ssd storage) and then at midnight, it transfers yesterday's recordings to a secondary location (eg offsite slow storage). Just know that retrieving archived footage will take longer.

Edit: as a side note, I'm planning on getting a refurbished dell server from vibrant tech for a upcoming camera install. Their prices are surprisingly good for what you get. I got a extra compellent disk tray with 24tb of slow storage for about 15% of the new price from dell for my datacenter.

Generally, for that many cameras, and depending on the number of connected clients, I would be using 2x windows servers with, minimum, 8 x drives each on 8 drive hardware RAID cards (one vitual RAID drive for maximum R/W speed with one hot spare).  It depends on your recording settings (motion/continous).  Using a NAS is adequate for event archiving, but not generally for live recording.  I have used 16 bay iSCSI over copper networks with success, but would prefer SCSI DAS (direct connected with SAS/SATA expansion card) if you are using the network for video to storage transport.  I know with the VMS I use, a NAS would not work for live recording.

This solution is what I have used for redundant archive backups of select cameras, but not with the camera count you are indicating (and sure not if you are not making these a RAID single virtual drive).  I would expect, under normal situations, you would need 30-40 TB for 30 plus days.  If you did RAID on those 4 drives, you would get 24 TB of storage.  With no hot spare, a lost drive would severely degrade the R/W performance.

Consult your VMS vendor.  Usually their sizing applications will indicate minimum drive counts and configurations.  As a general rule, I use a setup with a drive per maximum 20 cameras, and 5 cameras per TB (30 days) using RAID.  This is rough, and applications (and number of exterior which I run continuous in most cases) as well as scene activity and lighting conditions come into play.  I normally use Windows Server, but will use Windows 10 for small camera count scenarios (and limited connected clients).  Remember, not only are you supporting storage, but continuous deleting plus clients accessing archived video.  Bottlenecks due to R/W limitations will hinder effectiveness of the system.