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How long will your card or drive actually hold?
Local storage only helps if the window is long enough to be useful when something happens.
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How long will your card or drive actually hold?
Local storage only helps if the window is long enough to be useful when something happens.
- Written per day
- 0 GB/day
- Before it loops
- 0 days
Worked at roughly 0.45, 0.9 and 1.8 GB per hour for 1080p, 2K and 4K under H.265, and motion recording assumed at about 40 minutes of triggers a day. Bitrate varies with scene complexity, so treat the answer as a range. A busy street will beat these numbers; a back fence will not come close to them.
The most common surprise is continuous 4K. Four cameras writing continuously at 4K get through roughly 170 GB a day between them, so a 2 TB recorder drive holds about twelve days. People expect months.
The second surprise runs the other way: a single camera recording on motion at 2K can sit on a 128 GB card for months, which is far longer than anyone realistically goes back. If that is your setup, buy the cheaper card and spend the difference on a high-endurance one rather than a bigger one.
Bitrate varies with how busy the scene is, so treat the output as a range. A camera pointed at a street with moving traffic and trees will beat these estimates; one pointed at a quiet back fence will not come close to them.
Size a recorder drive to the number of days you actually want to be able to go back, then add a margin. Most people who check after a break-in want the last week, not the last quarter.
Then look at
Updated October 27, 2026 by Henrik Halvorsen. Specifications were checked against the Amazon listings on that date. Prices are shown as bands because they change week to week; the listing shows today's.