How to Calculate the Recording Days of Storage Capacity for Hard Drive(HDD)

Regularly, one NVR can support 1*SATA or 2*SATA  or 4*SATA hard drive, the selectable HDD capacity types including 1TB, 2TB, 3TB, 4TB, up to 6TB and 8TB. The question is how many days a 4TB HDD can record? There are many free online tools to estimate the required HDD storage capacity, however, obviously, most of them can not provide accurate result, the reason is HDD recording time varies from camera’s bitrate setting.

To know what the exact video storage capacity required per day, you can use the following formula:

Storage capacity (Gigabyte)= 3600s (per hour)* 24 hours (per day)* Bitrate (kbps)/ 8 (Bit converted to byte)/ 1024 ( to Megabytes)/ 1024 (to Gigabytes)

Using this formula to calculate the required video storage capacity for one 720P IP camera, the camera’s bitrate setting value is 2048kbps, so one day the camera requires 21GB vstorage capacity like this: 3600x 24x 2048/ 8/ 1024/ 1024=21GB.

24 hours continuous recording estimated days is as below:

Recording Resolution	Recording channels Number of IP Cams	HDD Capacity
		500GB	1TB	2TB	4TB
1.0MP 720P	4CH (4pcs IPC)	6 Days	12 Days	24 Days	48 Days
	8CH (8pcs IPC)	3 Days	6 Days	12 Days	24 Days
	16CH (16pcs IPC)	1.5 Days	3 Days	6 Days	14 Days
2.0MP 1080P	4CH (4pcs IPC)	3 Days	6 Days	12 Days	24 Days
	8CH (8pcs IPC)	1.5 Days	3 Days	6 Days	12 Days
	16CH (16pcs IPC)	0.75 Days	1.5 Days	3 Days	6 Days

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