Zmodo 4-Channel All-in-One sPoE NVR Kit

Solid reviews (4 out of 5 eggs) over at newegg.com

Remember, you have to supply your own HDD for this deal. Be sure and use an HDD designed for 24x7 operations, like the WD Purple designed for surveillance operation as fellow Wooter’s corrected me on!
Newegg WD Purple 1TB

Actually, they recommend the WD purple drives or drives that are made for security camera use.

I bought a Zmodo a few years back, most features half-worked, or didn’t work at all. Customer support is basically non-existent. You get what you pay for, and a cam system at this price, don’t expect much.

I’m using a 1tb enterprise drive in my KGuard unit. 2 years and never has missed a beat. Has like a 20+ year life span if left on for 24/7. I tend to use segates for enclosed boxes like this. Generates less heat then WD’s and having something like 50tb storage in my house (everything from some NAS boxes, media servers, etc), segates tend to make less noise too. Every thing that has a WD array has HD coolers too. Both brands tend to be as reliable as the other but that’s just me. Some NAS boxes (netgear is one) has the ability to record your cameras feed also, as a backup. Hey, when it comes to safety and security, it’s all about redundancy.

How did you not recommend the WD Purples? This is what they were born to do!!!

Is this the same unit that was for sale here a few weeks ago? Why do you need a HDD?

I bought one of these last time, intending to use one of the spare hard drives I had sitting around. However, no matter what drive I used, it would format the drive, reboot, and when it came back up it would say it needed to be formatted, Buying one of the factory-recommended hard drives fixed it - just don’t plan to use this with anything else.

This is different from the Zmodo the other day whose cameras used cables with power and composite video, this uses ethernet cables with power-over-ethernet for the cameras, which also have better resolution.

I got one of these off amazon about 7 months back. I would not buy it again. I have had all 4 cameras replaced and after the warranty is up I am sure the cameras will go in the trash. the POE is good idea but will only work when attached to the Zmodo NVR. If you have a POE switch it Will Not power the cameras. You can use 3rd party software like iSpy but it has to flow through the NVR (no big deal).
I had to turn some video in to the cops… one issue I had was you can only save “Events” to the backup. The system records 24/7 but I could not backup (copy) any time before or after the event. I can watch it but not save it. The system stopped recording as a “Event” but I could still see the guy going in/out of the neighbors house.

I have one of these. The picture quality is very good but like others said the DVR is awful. It’s using some kind of voodoo POE so you can’t use the cameras without it’s embedded switch. The DHCP on it is really flaky if you try to disable it (so you can access the cameras directly bypassing the internal DVR) and 1 of my cameras has died.

I was looking at one on Amazon for $90 more but it comes with a 3 year warranty and a 1 TB HD included. I think the Amazon one is a newer model.

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00VAXBIVQ/ref=wl_it_dp_o_pC_S_ttl?_encoding=UTF8&colid=36N6X08ZZC0E8&coliid=I203MWSS9QYJUB

There seems to be a bit of discrepancy with the specs listings.

The specs tab states 1TB HDD max, though zmodo’s official specs state 4TB max.

With that said, as for the +$90 amazon model, they appear to be otherwise identical, the cameras sold in that one have an incremented model number (ZP-IBH15-S1 vs ZP-IBH15-S) but their overall specs are identical as far as I can tell.

If I were to guess at the model differences, the S1’s perhaps have a more recent firmware on them, but since I believe you can otherwise update the firmware yourself not sure the pre-updated firmware is worth an extra $90 :stuck_out_tongue:

Edit: Sorry I missed that the +$90 amazon model comes with a 1TB HDD as well, though not sure that makes the price worth it either since a 1TB Purple from newegg is only $60~

That all aside, I’ve had a few zmodo’s (I still actually have one from several years ago I got off woot rolling, though it’s an old D1 based set up), the only downside I’ve ever had to zmodo is their desktop software can be kinda weird and their OS/Firmware on the actual NVR’s always feel old-ish appearance wise.

If we are just recording when motion is detected, would we still need a large drive with the 24/7 spec?