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Surveillance Storage Calculator

Mounted Up Security Planning Tool

How Much Surveillance Storage Does Your System Really Need?

Plan the right recording capacity before installation. Compare 24/7 continuous recording and motion-triggered recording based on your cameras, retention period, resolution, frame rate, compression, and bitrate.

Build Your Storage Estimate

Enter the camera-system requirements below, then click Calculate Storage.

System Setup
Video Format & Quality
Motion-Only Recording
25%
≈ 6.0 active recording hours/day on a 24-hour schedule
Advanced: Enter the Camera Manufacturer's Actual Average Bitrate
For the most project-specific result, enter the configured average bitrate from the camera or NVR. This overrides the estimated bitrate derived from resolution, FPS, codec, quality, and scene activity.
Results will appear in the storage panel after you click Calculate Storage.
Professional Surveillance Planning

Retention Should Be Engineered Before the Recorder Fills Up.

Surveillance storage is driven primarily by average video bitrate, camera count, daily recording time, and retention period.

Resolution, frame rate, compression, image quality, and scene complexity affect bitrate. When the camera's actual configured bitrate is known, enter it in the advanced field for the most system-specific calculation.

Camera Count Each additional camera adds another video stream that must be stored.
Average Bitrate Bitrate is the most direct input used to calculate recorded video storage.
Retention Period Doubling the retention period approximately doubles the storage requirement.
Motion Activity Motion-only recording reduces recorded time based on how active the scene actually is.

Surveillance Storage FAQ

How does this calculator determine storage?
The calculator converts average bitrate in Mbps into stored data, then multiplies it by recording time, camera count, and retention period. The selected storage safety buffer is added after the raw recording requirement is calculated.
Does motion-only recording use less storage than 24/7 recording?
Usually, yes. Motion-triggered recording only stores video during detected activity. Actual savings depend on how often motion occurs and the camera's pre-event and post-event settings.
Why is actual camera bitrate more accurate than resolution alone?
Two cameras with the same resolution can use different amounts of storage because codec, frame rate, quality, scene complexity, and manufacturer configuration can produce different average bitrates.
Does the result include RAID or redundant storage?
No. The displayed result is a nominal recording-capacity estimate. RAID, mirroring, hot spares, recorder architecture, and other redundancy requirements should be added during final system engineering.

Planning estimate only. This calculator uses decimal drive capacity: 1 TB = 1,000 GB. Actual usable capacity and retention can be lower due to drive formatting, file-system overhead, recorder configuration, RAID, firmware behavior, and video bitrate variation.

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