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Tools

Recording storage calculator

Work out how much drive space a system needs before you buy it. Retention is the setting people get wrong most often, and it is cheaper to fix on paper than after installation.

Figures are an estimate. Real bitrate varies with scene detail and movement, so we add headroom when quoting.

How to read this

Two things move the number more than anything else. Recording continuously instead of on motion roughly doubles it, and moving from 4MP to 4K roughly doubles it again. If a drive comes out larger than the recorder can take, the answer is usually fewer days of retention or motion recording on the quieter cameras, not a bigger recorder.

Surveillance rated drives are specified for continuous writing. A desktop drive will accept the same job and fail early, which is the failure people discover only when they go looking for footage.

A recorder also needs power through a cut to keep recording. Use the UPS and battery backup calculator to size it.