A Guide to Security System Storage

It is important to consider how much storage you need in order to handle continuous recording over the life of the recorder without loss of performance

Key Takeaways

•   Understanding storage needs is important for safe and reliable storage of data for later retrieval

•   Surveillance drives are optimised for constant, 24/7 writing and rewriting of terabytes of camera footage each week, required for modern surveillance systems, where a standard PC would typically takes months or years of heavy use to fill its hard drive

•   There are several factors that should be considered when choosing your drives, including the capability and compatibility of the recorder itself

•   Protection of the footage on the drive typically relies on a number of factors, including strong digital encryption, physical device security, electrical surge protections and good network security practices

•   Our calculator tool makes it easy to obtain an approximate figure for total storage, based on several factors, including number of cameras, encode settings, video resolution and compression

Introduction

Choosing the right hardware is a huge part of building an ideal security system for your clients, but another important consideration is how your video footage will be stored.

Surveillance drives are optimised for 24/7 writing and overwriting, making them especially ideal for security setups, but there are several questions that should be asked before choosing drives for your setup, including:

•   How much storage do I need for my specific setup?

•   Is the footage safe from hacking?

•   Do I need AI features?

This article will help you to answer the above questions, and we have also built a Storage Calculator to make it easier for you to discover exactly how much storage you may need for your security system.

What Are The Benefits?

A surveillance drive can be separated from a standard PC drive in one particular way. As How to Geek puts it in their article, “these drives have to be writing data --- specifically, video data --- all the time”. While a PC may be used for several hours and then powered off overnight, it is usually crucial that an NVR or DVR runs 24/7, meaning the storage drive has to keep up with that amount of data writing.

A surveillance drive is not typically built to read data, with much of its functionality being tuned to rewriting large amounts of data, making them highly optimised for consistent writing of video footage from connected cameras.

Choosing the Right Drive

It is important to note that due to the global AI demand that has risen massively over the last year, production delays are expected to also affect surveillance drives, which are “predicted to last until 2030”, as TechRadar reports. However, PureTech continues to maintain availability of surveillance drives from leading brands, which we will discuss in this section.

At PureTech, we sell three main brands for surveillance storage solutions. These are Seagate, Western Digital and Toshiba. All three are rated for 24/7, reliable and high-quality recording. While all drives that we offer are carefully chosen for high-performance, the drives that we hold in stock may vary, and the correct choice depends on the number of cameras and channels in your video surveillance system.

Selected drives that we offer are also optimised for the additional hardware strain required for AI surveillance features, namely Seagate SkyHawk AI and WD Purple Pro drives, which can be considered for higher workload setups that will make use of advanced AI analytics.

As for safety of video footage, while self-encrypting drives are available on special order from manufacturers such as Toshiba and Seagate, the usual area of vulnerability that should be looked at in a security system is at the camera, recorder and network level.

The footage stored by our NVRs is automatically encrypted to maintain good data safety standards, with the data only accessible through the recorder to prevent spoofing and hacking attempts. This means that the main point of vulnerability is the recorder, its access points, the connected cameras and the network it is installed in. Ensure that the recorder and cameras have secure passwords and that the network is secure.

As an example, a 2026 study outlined that “frequently reported weaknesses were default credentials, insecure firmware, unencrypted video streams, weak protocol configuration”. Read our article on How to Protect CCTV Systems from Hackers to find out more on how to configure your security systems and networks for better data security.

Checking Your NVR or DVR

Before deciding how much storage you may need for your setup, it is important to understand the storage capacity of your NVR or DVR and how much storage it needs to handle the number and quality of cameras that you have installed. You should also check whether the recorder is capable of handling that amount of storage. You can usually find the storage capacity of a recorder on the data sheet or manual.

Using our Viper security range as an example, the recorder capacity can range from a single SATA (up to 10TB) for a standard 4 channel recorder, while a specialist 256 channel deep-learning AI recorder can support up to 160TB.

It should also be noted that some NVRs support RAID (Redundant Array of Independent Disks). You may see RAID 0, 1, 5, 6 or 10 mentioned on a device’s data sheet. Installing drives in a RAID configuration allows a single drive to fail safely in the array, because all data stored on the failed drive is stored on another. This redundancy reduces the total capacity of the array, as all footage is recorded twice, but it can make the system more robust for sites where any data loss can have major liabilities.

Calculating Storage Requirements

There are several factors that can affect how much storage a system requires, such as:

•   How many cameras will be connected as part of the security system

•   Camera stream quality

•   How many hours per day the recorder needs to run, if not 24/7

•   Intelligent site activity level if conditional recording is used

•   Number of days the footage needs to be stored

•   Required compression type (MJPEG, H.264 or H.265)

Calculating storage can be a complex and time-consuming task without tools. That’s why we have created our own storage calculator, using the criteria above to help you to figure out the approximate total amount of storage that you would require for your system.