During video surveillance planning stage, we often face a question – how many HDDs should I use for my video surveillance system. Estimating or calculating the required video storage can be quite simple by using the formula, or it can be complicated when considering many factors including resolution, frame rate, video compression, and bitrate settings. We herein provide you a freeware which can calculate the video storage requirement of the camera based on many these variable parameters. Using this calculator you can roughly estimate how long can a HDD record in your computer/DVR/NVR.
Download the the free calculator software
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Running this simple software, you can instantly estimate the total video storage for your desired storage (number of days) per network camera. Additionally, you can use the formula as below:
Bitrate (Kbit/s) ÷ 8*3600*hours each camera will record per day÷1024÷1024= video storage (GByte)
How long can a HDD record for your DVR/NVR?
| Recording channels | 500G HDD | 1TB HDD | 2TB HDD |
| 4 channels | 9.7 days | Nineteen days | Thirty eight days |
| 8 channels | 4.8 days | Ten days | Twenty days |
| 16 channels | Four days | Eight days | Sixteen days |
If you use the H.265 network cameras and NVRs, then you can reduce 50% video storage usage. By the way, we herein we provide you a summarized table to show you the video storage when a camera records in non-stop 24 hours manner.
| Resolution | Bitrate (25fps) | Hours | Days | Weeks | Months | 6 Months |
| 2560x1920 | 20Mbps | 8.8GB | 210.9GB | 1.44TB | 6.18TB | 37.08TB |
| QXGA(2048x1536) | 13Mbps | 5.7GB | 137GB | 960GB | 4TB | 24TB |
| QXGA(2048x1536) | 9Mbps | 4GB | 95GB | 665GB | 2.78TB | 16.68TB |
| QXGA(1600x1200) | 8Mbps | 3.5GB | 84.4GB | 591GB | 2.47TB | 14.82TB |
| 1080P(1920x1080) | 8Mbps | 3.5GB | 84.4GB | 591GB | 2.47TB | 14.82TB |
| 1.3MP(1280x960) | 4Mbps | 1.8GB | 43.2GB | 303GB | 1.21TB | 7.26TB |
| 720P(1280x720) | 2Mbps | 900MB | 21.09GB | 147.66GB | 632.8GB | 3.7TB |
| VGA(640x480) | 1536kbps | 675MB | 15.8GB | 110.6GB | 474GB | 2.78TB |
| 2CIF(704x288) | 1024kbps | 450MB | 10.5GB | 73.5GB | 315GB | 1.85TB |
Note: 1Mbps = 1024 kbps; 1024Mbps = 1GByte
Disclaim: Only for reference, the result calculated by software/table is based on regular H.264 codec, after several years' improvement, we reckon that the H.264 video compression efficiency has been greatly improved, so data may not accurate for today's H.264 IP cameras and DVRs/NVRs.
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