How many days a 4TB HDD NVR can record?
Regularly, a NVR can support 1 SATA hard drive, the selectable HDD capacity types including 1TB, 2TB, 3TB, 4TB. The question is how many days a 4TB HDD can record? Obviously, there are many free online tools to estimate the required HDD storage, however, 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)x24 hours (per day)xBitrate (kbps)/8 (Bit converted to byte)/1024 (Megabytes)/1024 (Gigabytes)
- 21GB = 3500x24x2048/8/1024/1024
Using this formula to calculate the required video storage capacity for one 720p IP camera, and the camera’s bitrate setting value is 2048kbps, so every day the camera requires 21GB video storage capacity.
24 hours continuous recording estimated days:
| Recording Resolution | Recording channels/Number of IPC | 500G | 1TB | 2TB | 4TB |
| 1.0 Megapixel (720p) | 4 channels | 6 days | 12 days | 24 days | 48 days |
| 8 channels | 3 days | 6 days | 12 days | 24 days | |
| 16 channels | 1.5 days | 3 days | 6 days | 12 days | |
| 2.0 Megapixel (1080p) | 4 channels | 3 days | 6 days | 12.5 days | 24 days |
| 8 channels | 1.5 days | 3 days | 6 days | 12 days | |
| 16 channels | 0.74 days | 1.5 days | 3 days | 6 days |
How to know the required IP camera bandwidth?
IP camera bandwidth also varies with bitrate setting, the default setting value of 1080p IP camera is 4096Kb/s, so it's required network bandwidth: 4096Kb/s÷8 (1 byte = 8 bit) = 512KB/s = 4Mb/s. So,a 4-Megapixel IP camera = 8192Kb/s = 1024KB/s = 8Mb/s
Get My Latest Posts
Subscribe to get the latest updates.
Your email address will never be shared with any 3rd parties.