5MP Bulb Telescopic PTZ Security Camera

The X1A records to a microSD card of up to 256GB, and that is the right answer for most buyers. It has one weakness worth understanding before you buy: card capacity sets how far back you can look. Once the card fills, the oldest clips are overwritten. If you want to review last month’s recordings rather than last week’s, the camera needs somewhere else to write.

That is the point where a NAS enters the picture. Instead of raising the card size and losing the same footage later, the X1A writes over your network to storage you already own — and the retention window becomes a matter of disk space rather than card size. Nothing about the camera changes. Only the destination does.

Three things decide whether a NAS pairing works well in practice, and none of them are about resolution.

Bandwidth is the first. The X1A runs on 2.4GHz and 5GHz Wi-Fi, and 5GHz is the band you want for continuous upload. On 2.4GHz the camera competes with every other device on your network, and a saturated link is what causes dropped segments rather than the camera itself.

The second is the folder you point it at. Give the camera its own directory and its own retention policy. Mixing camera footage into the same volume as your documents makes both harder to manage, and it puts home-recorded video inside whatever backup and sync rules you set for work files.

Third, decide what happens when the network drops. The card is the safety net here. Keep it in the camera even when the NAS is the primary destination — the X1A keeps recording locally, and you pick the gap up once the link returns. Buyers who remove the card to “save money” are the ones who come back with a recording gap exactly where the incident was.

Storage sizing gets easier once you stop trying to keep everything. The X1A’s motion-triggered recording means most of what lands on the NAS is nothing you will ever open again. In practice, a schedule that keeps recent event clips at full retention and drops older ones to a summary is what most homes and small offices actually need. What you are buying with a larger NAS is not more footage — it is the option to keep the recording you did not know you needed.

The X1A is a bulb-mount camera, which shapes this decision more than most spec sheets suggest. It installs in an E27 socket with a 30mm telescopic body, so it goes where a camera is hard to wire and a light fixture already exists — porches, garages, side entries. Those are exactly the positions where an incident is most likely to be recorded and most likely to be needed weeks later. A card that holds ten days is a poor fit for that job.

Does the X1A work with any NAS? It writes over the local network the same way it writes to a card, so the requirement is a reachable destination rather than a specific brand. What varies is how much configuration each platform asks of you.

Can I keep using the microSD card as well? Yes, and you should. Local card recording and network recording are not mutually exclusive, and keeping both is what covers a network outage.

Do I need RAID? Not for one camera. RAID protects against a disk failing, not against a camera losing its link. Size the storage for the retention you want first; redundancy matters more once several cameras write to the same box.

What about the app? Live viewing and playback continue through the EseeCloud app. Adding a NAS changes where recordings are stored, not how you watch them.

If you are planning storage for several cameras rather than one, our local NAS storage range and the NAS Security Kit cover the sizing question in more detail — including how retention targets translate into disk capacity.