How much storage do I need?
Estimate your NAS capacity from what you'll actually store, then see how many drives that takes. Figures are rough averages - adjust to taste.
What you'll store
You'll need
- Data to store
- 0 TB
- Recommended usable
- 0 TB
Drives needed
- RAID 5 (1-drive safety)
- 0 × TB (→ TB usable)
- RAID 6 (2-drive safety)
- 0 × TB (→ TB usable)
Check the exact split in the RAID calculator.
How we estimate
Rough per-item averages: HD movie ~6 GB, 4K movie ~40 GB, TV episode ~1.5 GB, photo ~5 MB, and a 1080p security camera ~30 GB per day of continuous recording. Your mileage varies with quality and codec, so treat the result as a starting point and round up.
"Recommended usable" adds 30% headroom for growth (toggle off for a bare minimum). Then we work out how many drives of your chosen size reach that usable capacity in CMR RAID 5 or RAID 6 - for large arrays, prefer RAID 6. See RAID and how many drives you need.