How much storage does one 1080p camera need?

A 1080p camera recording continuously at 15 fps in H.265 on a medium-activity scene needs roughly 15 GB per day, or about 450 GB for 30 days of retention. Dropping to motion-only recording at 25 percent duty cycle cuts that to about 110 GB. Moving to 4K at 30 fps raises it past 2 TB.

Does H.265 really halve storage compared to H.264?

Close to it, but not quite. At equivalent image quality H.265 typically lands 40 to 50 percent below H.264. Add a smart codec such as Axis Zipstream, Hanwha WiseStream, or Bosch intelligent streaming and the saving grows further, but the benefit depends heavily on scene activity: a still corridor compresses dramatically, a windy parking lot barely does.

Does motion-based recording cut storage proportionally?

Almost. Pre-event and post-event buffers add recorded time beyond the motion itself, so real duty cycle usually runs a few points above the measured motion percentage. Motion recording also leaves gaps in the timeline, which matters if the footage is meant to serve as evidence for an audit or an incident review.

How much headroom should I add to a video storage array?

Plan 15 to 20 percent above the calculated figure. That absorbs bitrate variance in busy scenes, retention policy changes, added cameras, and the gap between decimal TB on the drive label and binary TiB reported by the recorder. Parity drives for RAID 5 or RAID 6 sit on top of that, not inside it.

Does this calculator send my fleet details anywhere?

No. Every calculation runs in the browser. Nothing is submitted, and no account is required. The share link encodes the inputs in the URL itself, so sending it to a colleague sends the numbers, not a stored record.

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Camera storage calculator

A 1080p camera recording continuously at 15 fps in H.265 needs roughly 15 GB per day, about 450 GB for 30 days of retention. Change the resolution, the codec, the scene, or the recording mode and that number moves by an order of magnitude, which is what this is for. Build the fleet you actually have, group by group, and get storage, bandwidth, and array sizing you can hand to a client.

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Camera storage sizing sheet

Result

total storage 14.3 TB 13.0 TiB as the recorder reports it

per camera, per day 14.9 GB 32 cameras, 475 GB per day total

peak record bandwidth 44.0 Mbps all cameras at once

average record bandwidth 44.0 Mbps sustained, 24 hour mean

16.8 TB raw after 15 percent headroom. At 18 TB per drive that is 3 drives (1 for data, 2 parity) on RAID 6. Retention 30 days.

Group	Cameras	Stream	Recording	Mbps each	GB / day each	Storage

Planning estimate produced by the MentatNOC camera storage calculator. Bitrates are modeled, not measured. Validate against the bitrate the cameras actually report before committing to hardware.

How the estimate is calculated

Storage is bitrate multiplied by time. Everything else is working out what the bitrate is going to be, which is where calculators disagree with each other.

This one starts from bits per pixel per frame rather than a lookup table of preset bitrates, so any resolution and frame rate combination stays consistent. The baseline is 0.07 bits per pixel per frame for H.264 at standard quality on a medium-activity scene. At 1080p and 30 fps that works out to about 4.4 Mbps, which lines up with what cameras actually produce in the field.

Frame rate scales sub-linearly. Halving frame rate does not halve bitrate, because each remaining frame carries more change and needs more bits. The model uses frame rate to the power of 0.8, so 1080p at 15 fps lands near 57 percent of the same camera at 30 fps rather than 50 percent.

Codec factors

Codec	Factor	Note
H.264	1.00	Baseline. Still the default on older fleets.
H.265	0.55	Roughly 40 to 50 percent lower at equivalent quality.
H.264 + smart codec	1.00 x scene	Axis Zipstream, Hanwha WiseStream, Bosch intelligent streaming.
H.265 + smart codec	0.55 x scene	Largest saving, and the most scene-dependent.

Scene activity

Scene activity does two things at once. It changes how many bits the encoder needs, and it changes how much a smart codec can save. That second effect is the one most calculators leave out, and it is the reason a smart codec that saves 55 percent in a stockroom saves almost nothing on a windy parking lot at dusk.

Activity	Bitrate factor	Smart codec factor	Typical scene
Low	0.80	0.45	Corridor, stockroom, server room. Long still periods.
Medium	1.00	0.60	Office floor, retail aisle, lobby. Intermittent movement.
High	1.30	0.85	Parking lot, street, loading dock. Traffic, weather, foliage.

Recording modes

Continuous. Records for the stated hours per day at the stated frame rate. Simplest to size and simplest to defend when someone asks for footage of a specific minute.
Motion or event. Records only during the duty cycle you set. Storage falls close to proportionally, though pre-event and post-event buffers push real duty cycle a few points above the motion percentage.
Continuous plus event boost. Records a low frame rate baseline all day and lifts to a higher frame rate during activity. This is what most modern deployments actually do, it keeps a gapless timeline, and it is the mode free calculators tend not to model at all.

Array sizing

The headroom percentage is applied first, covering bitrate variance, retention changes, and the gap between decimal TB on a drive label and binary TiB reported by the recorder. Parity capacity is added on top: one drive for RAID 5, two for RAID 6, a full mirror for RAID 1 and RAID 10. Drive counts round up, because half a drive is not a purchase order.

What moves the number most

In descending order: retention days, resolution, recording mode, frame rate, codec, scene activity. Retention is linear and unforgiving, so doubling 30 days to 60 doubles the array. Resolution is close behind, since pixel count grows faster than the resolution label suggests: 4K is four times 1080p, not twice.

The two levers with the best ratio of saving to compromise are usually frame rate and recording mode. Dropping from 30 fps to 15 fps costs far less evidentiary value than most people expect, and a low frame rate baseline with an event boost keeps a complete timeline for a fraction of continuous high frame rate storage.

Assumptions and limits

Figures are planning estimates, not measurements. Real bitrate depends on lens, lighting, noise, encoder tuning, and the specific firmware in the camera.
Storage uses decimal units. 1 TB is 1,000 GB. Recorders often report binary TiB, which reads about 9 percent smaller for the same disk. Both are shown.
Audio, metadata, and analytics streams are not included. They are small relative to video, but not zero.
Bandwidth figures cover recording only. Live viewing, exports, and remote clients add load on top.
Peak bandwidth assumes every camera streams at its maximum at the same time, which is the number to size the switch and recorder uplink against.
Nothing is transmitted. The calculation runs entirely in the browser and the share link carries the inputs in the URL.

Sizing assumes the cameras behave

Every figure above rests on an assumption that is wrong more often than integrators like: that each camera is still streaming at the resolution and frame rate it was commissioned with. Cameras drift. One reboots nightly and comes back at a lower frame rate. One loses its clock and timestamps footage into a window nobody can retrieve. One stops recording and nobody notices until the day the footage is requested. Storage bought for a fleet of 500 healthy cameras quietly becomes storage for 480 healthy cameras and 20 that are producing nothing usable.

MentatNOC does not store or watch your video. It watches whether the cameras producing it are healthy: online, on time, on the firmware you intended, with credentials and certificates that have not expired, and still recording. Sizing is a one-day exercise. Knowing the fleet still matches the sizing is a daily one. See what that looks like on the platform page, or walk a live fleet in the interactive demo.

from sizing to certainty

Know the fleet still matches the plan.

Health, firmware, certificates, credentials, and recording state across every camera you support.

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