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— CCTV Storage · Retail

Retail store — 16 cameras, 30-day retention

Problem. A retail store with 16 4MP H.265 cameras needs 30 days of continuous recording for loss-prevention and incident review.

Answer. 16 cameras × 4MP H.265 × 25 fps × 30 days lands around 6–8 TB of usable storage. The calculator returns the raw figure; the BOQ rounds up for spare-disk and RAID overhead.

02 / In depth

How this preset reads — the engineering view.

Retail CCTV retention is regulatorily and operationally driven. 30 days is the practical minimum for loss-prevention investigations (covers a typical shrinkage-review cycle) and aligns with most insurer requirements for claim corroboration.

This preset assumes 16 cameras at 4MP H.265 with a 25 fps full-frame rate and motion-triggered recording. The calculator returns the storage envelope before RAID overhead — a real BOQ adds 30–40 % for RAID 5/6 redundancy and spare-disk space.

Bitrate is the dominant variable: H.265 is ~50 % more efficient than H.264, motion-only recording typically halves storage again, and dropping fps from 25 to 15 cuts another 40 %. The calculator lets you sweep each axis to find the cost-vs-evidence-quality trade.

Out of scope: VMS choice (Hikvision, Dahua, Milestone, Genetec), camera placement plan, network bandwidth at the switch (CCTV is the dominant traffic load on most retail LANs), and the lifecycle / AMC plan that determines failure-rate budgets for the disk array.

What this preset deliberately does not solve

  • RAID overhead adds 30–40 % to the raw storage figure.
  • H.265 vs H.264, fps and motion-triggered recording are the dominant compression variables.
  • Disk lifecycle (typically 5–7 years for enterprise NAS drives in continuous-write) is a separate TCO line.

How this preset differs from its siblings

The factory-90-day sibling preset configures continuous recording (industrial process audit requires full frames), more cameras, and a 3× longer retention window — the resulting storage envelope is an order of magnitude larger (≈145–150 TB vs 6–8 TB). This preset's distinguishing decisions are motion-triggered recording (acceptable for retail — most frames have no useful information) and the 30-day retention floor (matches insurance and loss-prevention norms). Different sector, different evidence requirement, different storage architecture.

02 / What that means, drawn

Cameras to rack · H.265+ · 30-day retention. Cameras: 16 cameras (4MP · 25 fps) — your figure. Per-camera stream: 4 Mbps, reached by profile default (Indicative) — published figure. Recorded to disk: 19.2 Mbps, reached by × 16 × 30% duty (Motion-triggered (30% duty)) — computed here. Storage: 7.5 TB, reached by × 30 days + 20% (0.5 TB per camera) — computed here. PoE load: no figure (the PoE tool sizes this) — not sized here. Switching: no figure (ports are sized elsewhere) — not sized here. Rack: no figure (rack units come from the kit) — not sized here.

64.0 Mbps live before the duty factor · linear in cameras, bitrate and days

This preset’s storage chain uses the same profile, duty factor and headroom as the calculator. Published profile figures retain their source status. Scene coverage, PoE, switching and rack design are not sized by this calculation.

03 / Hydrated calculator

Try the configuration — live.

The calculator below is preloaded with this preset’s state. Adjust any input — your URL stays shareable.

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