REOLINK NVS36 NO HDD (RLN36) (36 CHANNELS, 3 BAYS) - IP VIDEO RECORDER

Thirty-six channels and three drives: hardware sized for a site, not a house

The NVS36 is the retail name for the recorder Reolink builds as the RLN36, and it accepts up to thirty-six cameras at once — four times what the eight-channel boxes most households buy will take. It works with the entire Reolink IP range at 4, 5, 8 and 12 MP and records in H.265, which halves the file size against H.264 at the same picture quality; spread across thirty-six channels, that saving turns into weeks of extra archive. Three internal bays each take one hard drive, up to 16 TB per bay and 48 TB in total once all three are populated. There are two display outputs, HDMI up to 3840×2160 and VGA, so one screen can hold the live mosaic while the other keeps a single critical channel such as the gate or the till. Twenty accounts are supported, one administrator and nineteen users, and on a site running several security shifts that matters more than it sounds: each operator sees only the cameras assigned to them, and the log records who opened the archive and when.

No PoE ports at all: the one surprise that catches installers out

For all its thirty-six channels, the RLN36 has no power-over-Ethernet ports whatsoever, so cameras cannot be plugged into it directly. The rear panel carries four gigabit downstream RJ-45 ports for camera segments plus a separate LAN port for the router; each downstream port feeds its own PoE switch, and the cameras go into those switches. Budget for this from day one, because a thirty-six camera system needs roughly four 8- or 16-port PoE switches, their power supplies and cabinet space, and without them there is literally nothing to plug a camera into once the box is opened. The flip side is a flexibility that boxed NVRs with integrated PoE cannot offer: the switches sit close to the cameras, so four uplinks arrive in the server room instead of thirty-six long camera runs, and on a spread-out property the cable you save outweighs what the switches cost. If what you really want is a plug-and-play unit for four to eight cameras around a house, this is the wrong shelf entirely — the catalogue holds Reolink recorders with PoE built in that need no extra hardware at all.

The drive is not included: what to buy and what to check

The words "no HDD" in the product name are meant literally — the recorder arrives with empty bays and the disk is a separate purchase. Each of the three bays takes up to 16 TB, 48 TB altogether, and the drive should come from a surveillance line such as WD Purple or Seagate SkyHawk, because a desktop disk is not rated for continuous multi-stream writing and rarely survives into its second year of that duty. One detail matters here more than raw capacity, and that is the recording technology: SMR drives, often marketed simply as big and inexpensive, stall under sustained multi-channel writing and produce dropped frames, so insist on CMR. Hot swap is absent, so changing a drive means powering the unit down and opening the case, which is why that maintenance gets scheduled for an hour the site can afford to go unrecorded. RAID is not supported either — the three drives behave as three independent volumes, and if one fails the footage stored on it is gone, so it pays to spread critical cameras across different disks or to mirror their recording onto the memory card inside the camera itself.

How many days of archive will actually fit

Archive depth is counted in days rather than terabytes, and the arithmetic is straightforward: one megabit per second of continuous stream works out at roughly 10.8 GB per day. A 4 MP Reolink camera recording around the clock in H.265 produces about 4 Mbit/s, so close to 43 GB daily; sixteen such cameras consume roughly 0.7 TB a day, which is about three weeks on a single 16 TB drive and more than two months across the full 48 TB. Move up to 8 MP cameras and the stream roughly doubles: thirty-six channels at 8 Mbit/s come to about 3 TB every day, so even 48 TB covers only a fortnight of continuous recording. With 12 MP cameras, ten days on a fully populated recorder is the realistic figure. The biggest lever is not the disk but the recording mode — event-triggered or scheduled recording stretches the same terabytes three to five times over, and most real installations mix the two, keeping the perimeter and the till on continuous recording while everything else writes only on detection.

Alarm inputs and outputs, and where the recorder's own intelligence ends

The RLN36 takes eight alarm inputs and drives four alarm outputs, which is rare in the consumer segment: the inputs accept reed switches on gates, infrared beams, panic buttons or the relay outputs of an alarm panel, while the outputs trigger a siren, a floodlight or a lock. A working scenario looks like this — a beam along the fence is broken, and the recorder bookmarks the archive, switches the lights on and pushes a notification in a single action, so nobody has to hunt for the right minute across thirty-six channels. Be clear about the division of labour, though: person and vehicle recognition happens inside the Reolink cameras rather than in the recorder, which only receives, filters and stores the resulting events, so how smart the system behaves is decided by which cameras you attach to it. Server-side analytics such as face recognition, visitor counting or licence-plate reading are not part of this device, and if those are the requirement, the job belongs to a different class of equipment. What you get in exchange is exactly what this hardware is bought for: rock-steady round-the-clock recording of thirty-six streams, the familiar Reolink app and remote access with no subscription charged for watching your own footage.

Where it belongs and what it was designed for

This recorder is aimed at sites where the cameras are spread over a large area or across several buildings: a production base, a vehicle depot, a farm, a construction site, a warehouse complex, a market, a hotel, or a handful of shops from one chain sharing a plot. The four-segment layout is a convenience rather than a constraint, because every building or zone gets its own PoE switch and its own cable run, and only four uplinks converge in the server room instead of thirty-six. An operating range of -10 to +45 °C and an IP20 chassis state plainly where the unit belongs — a heated room or a ventilated cabinet, not an unheated winter warehouse and certainly not an outdoor enclosure. At 2.26 kg and 330×310×48 mm it sits comfortably on a shelf or in a rack, but leave space beside it for the switches and their power bricks. For a private house with four to six cameras this is heavy overkill in both channel count and supporting hardware, and a compact NVR with integrated PoE is the sensible answer there.

How it differs from the neighbouring Reolink recorders in this catalogue

Its closest relative by logic is the Reolink RLN16-410 with no HDD, which also ships empty but carries sixteen built-in PoE ports and a storage ceiling of 8 TB, so it runs straight out of the box with no switches at all as long as the camera count stays at sixteen or below. The NVS16 (RLN16-410) is the same machine with a 4 TB drive already fitted, handy if you would rather not choose a disk yourself, though your archive depth is then fixed by whatever was installed. NVS8 (RLN8-410) and NVS4 give eight and four channels with integrated PoE respectively, the usual pick for a house or a small shop where thirty-six channels will never be needed. There is one more model without PoE, the twelve-channel NVS12W with a 2 TB drive, but its camera ceiling sits three times lower than here. In short, the RLN36 earns its place on one condition only: you already run more than sixteen cameras, or you know for certain that you soon will, and you need tens of terabytes of archive — in every other case a model with built-in PoE is cheaper to install and simpler to live with.

If you are unsure how many switches and drives your camera count calls for, send us the list of viewpoints and the archive depth you need. We will work out the configuration and tell you honestly whether thirty-six channels are genuinely required or a simpler recorder will do the job.