Live Video Is Choppy, Tech Says It Is Because System Is Backing Up

"due to the redundancy back up system saving data to additional hard drives, causing a delay and slightly slow fps appearance."

If the recorder has only a single network port, and if its already close to maxed out for bandwidth, and if the "redundancy back up" is backing up to something like an external NAS using the same network port, I could see it having issues. This would be a poor design in itself, but as John already said, seems to be a poor job.

In my experience, when one talks about "redundancy" they are talking about RAID 1 (Mirroring) in where the system writes to two drives simultaneously and if one drive fails then the other takes over. As far as I know there is zero performance difference in writing with RAID 1 and ive heard some people say that reading will benefit with increased performance (since it can read from both drives at the same time) though I have never benchmarked this myself to know for sure.

John, wouldnt it be possible to tell the difference between a low frame rate and an overwhelmed system just by looking?

I would think that a low frame rate would be consistant in that you would see the choppyness and it would be consistantly choppy (constant frame rate), where an overwhelmed network I would assume would either drop random frames (if UDP), or come in bursts when bandwidth allows (if TCP) - (eg. still image for a few seconds, then video comes in and plays fast all at once).

I would also assume if it was overwhelmed (either bandwidth or storage) that the streams would possibly become unsynchronized? Although I think I've seen systems unsynchronized in the past without necessarily being overworked. I never really purposely overwhelmed a system to see what it does so maybe you could share your experience on that for me?