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— CCTV Storage · 5MP

Milesight AI Mini Dome 5MP: storage & retention

Problem. A fleet of Milesight AI Mini Dome 5MP cameras generates meaningfully more footage per day than a 2MP or 4MP line, so sizing the NVR and drive pool around guesswork risks either wasted spend or a retention window that runs out early. The real decision is how many days of continuous 5MP footage a given camera count must hold, and what head-end class that implies.

Answer. For 16 Milesight AI Mini Dome 5MP cameras recording continuously at 30-day retention, the calculator lands at roughly 26 TB of usable storage, or about 54 GB per camera per day. That volume sits within an Entry NVR architecture class at this camera count.

02 / In depth

How this preset reads — the engineering view.

The Milesight AI Mini Dome 5MP is the storage driver in this sizing: at 5MP resolution and a typical 5 Mbps bitrate with H.265 encoding at 25 fps, one camera writes about 54 GB per day when recording continuously. H.265's smart-codec efficiency is what keeps that figure well below what the same 5MP sensor would need on plain H.264, where bitrate for equivalent quality typically runs meaningfully higher.

Scaling is linear from there: 16 cameras across 30 days of continuous recording works out to roughly 26 TB. Add cameras or extend retention and the figure scales in step - double the days, double the storage. At 16 cameras this workload still sits inside an Entry NVR head-end class; larger counts or longer retention windows push the architecture into higher tiers.

Use the calculator by dragging camera count, retention days, and recording schedule to watch the storage total recompute live. Switching from an always-on schedule to a motion-only or scheduled-hours profile applies a duty factor that reduces the effective recording time, which can cut the storage figure substantially versus continuous 24/7 capture.

The calculator does not decide real scene-activity bitrate variance (busy scenes push above the 5 Mbps average, quiet scenes fall below it), RAID or redundancy overhead, failover or archive-tier storage, network write-bandwidth limits, or the exact drive model and count to deploy. Those are engineering decisions for the final system design, not outputs of this sizing pass.

What this preset deliberately does not solve

  • The 5 Mbps figure is a scene-average bitrate for typical activity levels; higher-motion scenes will write more data per day than this estimate.
  • This preset assumes continuous 24/7 recording; switching to a motion-only or scheduled-hours profile in the calculator will lower the storage total via a duty factor.
  • The output is raw storage capacity only - it excludes RAID/redundancy overhead, archive tiers, and other headroom typically added in a final drive plan.

How this preset differs from its siblings

The Milesight AI Mini Dome 5MP's resolution and typical 5 Mbps H.265 bitrate sit above lower-resolution 2MP or 4MP camera lines, so its per-camera daily footprint and resulting NVR class differ from presets built around those cameras. This page exists separately so a search for this specific model's storage math lands on figures computed from its actual verified specification rather than a generic 5MP assumption.

03 / Hydrated calculator

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