All Collections
FAQ
Why does The TetherBox (5 channel) require an external drive for video surveillance?
Why does The TetherBox (5 channel) require an external drive for video surveillance?

The TetherBox built-in and external storage options

Roman Gaufman avatar
Written by Roman Gaufman
Updated over a week ago

Introduction

The TetherBox is our smallest unit and comes without built-in storage for video surveillance recording. There are several reasons for this:

  • These units can be used without any external storage to monitor device health and allow tunnelling to devices.

  • These units can be used to connect to alarm panels, access control and other devices where storage is not required.

  • These units were designed to be as compact and power efficient as possible and they are suitable for battery/solar powered sites. They are also suitable for situations with specific external storage requirements.

  • You can optionally connect different types of external storage to record up to 5 x 4K cameras or 10 x Standard Definition cameras, there is no limit on how much local storage you can use.

Note: You only require external storage if you are recording video surveillance either locally or to the cloud.

You can find the full datasheet for this unit here:

Emergency Built-In Storage

Should you wish to record cameras with this unit and the external storage fails, the TetherBox comes as standard with emergency on-board storage, which will keep the unit running for several weeks or until external storage is replaced.

Note: These units are not designed to record video surveillance without external storage and prolonged use without external storage will cause the units to fail.

External Storage

Please refer to the following article for external storage options:
โ€‹

Once external storage is connected, you will be able to:

  • Monitor the capacity of the connected local storage as well as optionally set a maximum local retention period

  • Monitor the health of storage devices added.

  • Estimate the expected lifetime of the drives and when they are predicted to fail.

Note: minimum retention will be dictated by the capacity of the attached local storage, consider cloud recording to increase the recording capacity.

Did this answer your question?