UniFi Protect Storage Calculator
UniFi Protect does not warn you when it runs out of space. It keeps recording and deletes the oldest footage first, so a site sold on 30 days can quietly deliver eleven and look perfectly healthy on the dashboard. This works out the real number before you buy.
Cameras
Bitrate is the configured ceiling, not the sensor. Variable bitrate means a quiet hallway sits below it and a windy car park sits at it.
Retention
Recorder
No redundancy — one drive failure loses the array
You will actually hold
10.5days
Short of 30 days. You need about 25.9 TB usable.
- Aggregate write
- 64 Mbps
- Per day
- 691 GB
- 30-day requirement
- 20.7 TB
- Usable after RAID + format
- 7.3 TB
- Days at 80% fill
- 8.4
- Cameras
- 12
Usable capacity is 1 of 1 drive after the layout, less the 9% a recorder loses formatting — drives are sold in decimal terabytes and the filesystem counts in tebibytes. The pass mark is 80% fill, not 100%.
The arithmetic
One megabit per second, written for a full day, is 10,800 megabytes — roughly 10.8 GB. So bitrate in Mbps × 10.8 = GB per day, per camera. Add the cameras, multiply by the days you owe, and size the result against usable capacity rather than the label.
Two deductions apply before the number is real. A parity layout gives back fewer drives than you bought — RAID 5 across four yields three — and a recorder reports about 9% less than the label, because drives are sold in decimal terabytes and the filesystem counts in tebibytes. This calculator applies both, so its figures run slightly harsher than a back-of-envelope division of the label.
The full reasoning, including bitrate by resolution, the duty-cycle trap in detections mode, and why mixed drive sizes waste money, is in the storage sizing guide.
After a week of real footage, read actual consumption off the Protect storage page rather than trusting any estimate — including this one. Real scenes, in your lighting, with your traffic, are the only data worth planning against.