Enter your cameras, resolution, and retention period — get the exact storage requirement in seconds. Works with H.264, H.265, and H.265+.
This tool calculates CCTV storage based on the actual bitrate produced by your cameras — not rough estimates. Enter the number of cameras, resolution (1080p, 4MP, 8MP), codec (H.264, H.265, H.265+), frames per second, scene complexity, and how many days of footage you need to keep. The calculator accounts for motion percentage, recording schedule, audio streams, and RAID overhead to give you an accurate drive count and total capacity figure ready for procurement.
It depends on resolution, codec, and motion level. A 4MP H.265 camera recording continuously at medium scene complexity typically uses 8–15 GB per day. A 1080p H.264 camera in the same conditions uses 18–25 GB per day. H.265+ can reduce this by 50–70% compared to H.264.
Multiply the number of cameras by the daily storage per camera, then by your retention period in days. Add 20% overhead for the filesystem and RAID parity. This tool does all of that automatically and recommends the exact drive count and capacity.
H.265 (HEVC) uses roughly 40–50% less storage than H.264 at the same image quality. H.265+ (Hikvision's scene-adaptive variant) can reduce storage by up to 70% compared to H.264 in static scenes. The savings depend on motion percentage and scene complexity.
Yes. The calculator includes vendor-specific bitrate presets from Hikvision, Dahua, Axis, Hanwha, and Uniview. You can also enter custom bitrate values for any camera brand.
RAID 5 gives you approximately 75–80% usable capacity of the total raw drive space. RAID 6 gives about 67%. RAID 10 gives 50%. JBOD (no RAID) gives 100% but has no redundancy. The calculator shows usable capacity after RAID for each configuration.
Ready to calculate? It takes under a minute.