Buying Guide · Camera Storage
Commercial camera storage planning.
A storage-sizing walkthrough for commercial surveillance — bitrate math, retention requirements, RAID strategy, and the trade-offs between on-premise NVR storage, distributed nodes, and hybrid cloud retention.
01 / Bitrate × Retention = Storage
The core formula.
Per-camera storage math is straightforward; per-system math is where installers forget the multiplier.
(Bitrate Mbps × 0.125 × 3600 × 24 × Days) / 1024
Example: 4MP camera, H.265, 4Mbps avg, 30 days
(4 × 0.125 × 86400 × 30) / 1024 = ~1265 GB per camera
Multiply by camera count + RAID overhead + free-space headroom.
Example: 16 cameras × 1265 GB = 20.2 TB raw
RAID 6 with 4 disks of 8TB = 16 TB usable
→ need ≥ 6 disks of 8TB for the 30-day window
Round up. Always. The bitrate is “average” — fast motion, low light, and IR strobing push real bitrates 30-60% above average. Without headroom, your NVR starts overwriting older footage 22 days into a “30-day” retention spec.
02 / Bitrate Reference by Resolution
Practical bitrate ranges.
H.265 (HEVC) cuts bitrate ~40-50% vs H.264 for similar quality. Use H.265 unless the head-end can’t decode it. Practical real-world bitrates we see on commercial sites:
───────────── ───── ────────── ────────────
2MP (1080p) H.264 3-4 Mbps 5-6 Mbps
2MP (1080p) H.265 1.5-2 Mbps 3 Mbps
4MP (QHD) H.264 6-8 Mbps 10-12 Mbps
4MP (QHD) H.265 3-4 Mbps 6 Mbps
5MP H.265 4-5 Mbps 8 Mbps
8MP (4K) H.265 6-8 Mbps 12-15 Mbps
Multi-imager H.265 8-12 Mbps 18-22 Mbps
Smart codec features (Hanwha WiseStream, Axis Zipstream, i-PRO Self Learning) can cut storage 30-50% by lowering bitrate in static scenes. Worth enabling on warehouse/parking-lot cameras where most frames are unchanged.
03 / Retention Requirements by Vertical
How long footage actually needs to live.
- General commercial — 30 days is standard. Most insurance carriers want at minimum.
- Retail (loss prevention) — 60-90 days. Investigation timelines run longer than commercial.
- Cannabis production / dispensary — 90 days minimum, often 180. Provincial regulations specify.
- Cash handling / financial — 90-180 days. PCI compliance considerations.
- Government / institutional — varies; many require 30 days primary + 1 year archive on motion events.
- Healthcare — 30 days general; HIPAA scenes need access controls beyond retention.
- Critical infrastructure — 90 days primary, often 1+ year on selected events.
Pull the retention requirement BEFORE specifying NVR capacity — half the under-spec installs we see came from sizing for “30 days” when the customer’s actual compliance need was 90.
04 / RAID Strategy
Redundancy without overspending.
- RAID 0 — striping only. Never use for surveillance — single disk failure loses everything.
- RAID 1 — mirroring. Only viable for very small systems; 50% capacity overhead is expensive at scale.
- RAID 5 — 1-disk redundancy. Acceptable for 4-6 disk systems with mid-range retention. Rebuild times on modern 8TB+ disks are long; second-disk-failure during rebuild is a real risk.
- RAID 6 — 2-disk redundancy. Default recommendation for any commercial NVR with 6+ disks. Survives rebuild-window failures.
- RAID 10 — mirrored stripes. Highest performance, 50% overhead. Use only for very high-channel-count or analytics-heavy systems.
Use surveillance-grade drives (WD Purple, Seagate SkyHawk, Toshiba S300) — they’re tuned for continuous-write workloads. Consumer or NAS drives in an NVR will fail within 12-18 months under 24/7 write load.
05 / Cloud, Edge, and Hybrid Options
Where on-prem ends and the network begins.
Three deployment models:
- On-premise NVR — full local storage, no recurring cost, full control. Default for most commercial deployments. Bandwidth-independent.
- Hybrid (local + cloud archive) — local NVR for primary retention, cloud archive for motion-event clips or post-incident copies. Manageable bandwidth cost; protects against on-site theft of the NVR itself.
- Cloud-native (full upload) — every camera uploads continuously. Lower upfront cost but recurring monthly fees per camera and significant upload bandwidth. NDAA-affected projects need to verify the cloud provider’s compliance posture.
For Ottawa-area commercial sites without symmetric fiber, full cloud upload often isn’t viable — upload bandwidth is the bottleneck. Hybrid (local primary + selective cloud archive) is the practical default.
Storage Spec Review
Planning storage for a camera deployment?
Send camera count, resolutions, codec choice, and required retention. We size the NVR, recommend a RAID configuration, and pre-verify NDAA compliance on the full recording path before the order ships.
Equipment Referenced · Storage & Cameras
Cameras and recorders sized in this guide.
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