Camera Network & Storage Planner

Ask how much storage a 4K camera needs and the honest answer is that it depends. Two 4K cameras can differ by a factor of five, because what actually reaches the disk is the encoded bitrate — and that depends on the codec, the compression setting, the frame rate, and how much the scene moves.

A camera watching an empty corridor at night compresses to almost nothing. The same camera watching a car park full of moving trees in daylight produces many times more. Resolution sets an upper bound and nothing else.

So the calculation starts from bitrate, which is a number you set on the camera and can read back from it. Typical figures are offered as a starting point and every one is editable, because a default dressed up as a fact is how storage plans go wrong.

The arithmetic

Storage per day = bitrate ÷ 8 × seconds recorded per day. A 4 Mbit/s camera recording continuously uses about 43 GB a day, so 30 days is roughly 1.3 TB — for one camera.

Motion recording is where estimates go wrong. "20% motion" sounds conservative until a windy day makes every camera trigger continuously. Size for the worst case you can tolerate, not the average you expect.

The network number that matters is the uplink, not each camera. Sixteen cameras at 4 Mbit/s is 64 Mbit/s arriving at the recorder continuously, every second of every day. That is a steady load, not a peak.