Should You Use Cameras With SD Storage?

For the relatively minimal cost of storage, it's not a big deal these days to use edge storage in addition to standard VMS storage. We did this one one site where they'd had some old analog cameras vandalized, and then discovered the DVR hadn't been running for about two months (insert facepalm). When we replaced DVR, and replaced the cameras with 2MP models, we added SD cards as a "backup".

Of course, Murphy is a mother, and the next time someone decided to hit the site, they actually managed to steal the DVR, AND several cameras... and the ones they didn't get weren't recording to SD anyway (as it turned out, they had a know problem with internal recording that had been fixed in a subsequent firmware update... *sigh*).

I tried to make a case for using a camera with on-board storage in a parking lot where the operator arms were being vandalized as there was no infrastructure. Also, I wanted to install one temporarily in an elevator that was being vandalized. Both times our Campus Safety director shot it down because did not want his officers removing and re-inserting SD cards. He was pretty adamant about it, and there really was no one else to do it. I don't really know what was his issue with it: evidence tampering? Incompetence?

I agree with Matt Ion - As an end user I prefer to have an SD card in cameras that support it just to have a backup in the event the VMS and camera aren't playing nice. One thing I have found with our cameras (I'm not sure if it's the same for all cameras) is that it's a pain to view video as individual files that need to be accessed on an individual basis.

I personally do not recommend SD recording as a sole recording method of a video surveillance system at all. SD card fails, and its life expectancy is way too short compared to HDDs. By the time you add the cost of finding sd card failures and repalcing them in an adhoc manner, it just does not make sense for a system with more than a handful number of cameras. In most cases, it involes a ladder and opening the camera to replace a sd card. And if the ip camera does not automatically recognize/format/use the new sd card, you have to configure them one by one. If you have a good service/maintenance contract, it might be a different story.

What I can tell you definitively John is that I'm seeing A LOT more interest in SOTE than I was even a year ago. Some of the use cases, okay ALL of the use-cases so far, have been pretty niche, but there is a common thread to them which is that SI's and End-Users are now aware that SOTE is more-or-less a commoditized feature on IP Cameras, and they want to begin utilizing it.

But that epiphany in our industry comes at a cost as well. What I mean is, most manufacturers who have SOTE on their hardware today did little more than lip service to it. Specifically, yes their cameras have storage slots that can hold SD, SDHC or even SDXC cards, and yes they have something in their interface which deals with managing and retrieving said storage, but the robustness on it today is severely lacking. That's a temporary problem that's fairly easy to fix by getting the manufacturer to update the camera FW with some basic disk health features that are common on other systems, but just be aware that while the hardware is ready and the market is awakening to it, there are lots of gremlins in the machines today.

From the pedestrian stand-alone SOTE (where it's just a camera recording and no video is stored anywhere else) to some of the deeper integrations I'm starting to see for restoring archives on network outage and pre-alarm buffering, SOTE promises some cool new functionality to deliver even more TCO benefits over analog. I'm glad this evolution is finally occurring because I've been an advocate of it for a long time.