Home / Tools

Security Camera Storage Cost Calculator

Turn retention requirements into a practical drive count and purchase-cost estimate instead of stopping at raw terabytes.

CamerasBitrate per camera (Mbps)Retention daysRecording hours/dayRecording duty cycle (%)Planning headroom (%)Usable fraction after RAID/redundancy (%)Drive size (TB)Price per drive (USD)

Calculating…

Why cost differs from capacity

A 10 TB retention requirement does not automatically mean “buy one 10 TB drive.” The recorder may only support certain drive sizes, you may want redundancy, and you still need headroom for variable bitrate, metadata, audio and expansion.

How to use the usable-fraction field

Leave it at 100% for a single-disk or JBOD-style capacity estimate. Use roughly 50% for a simple mirrored layout. Other RAID layouts vary with drive count and implementation, so enter the usable fraction that matches your recorder/storage design.

What is not included

This estimates drive purchase cost only. It does not include the NVR/NAS, power consumption, replacement drives, RAID controller overhead or backup storage.