Is 6TB storage enough for storing HD video?

[dyl47]

I plan on doing a lot of recording in HD and was wondering how fast my HDD's would fill up. The case that is in my shopping cart has 3, 3" bays and one of them will be occupied by my SSD. Will two more slots be enough, or should I find one which supports more 3" bays?

 

[i7Baby]

I've got a 2TB HDD. I do video editing. I use about 1TB for movies. But every 12 months I get rid of raw footage more than 2 years old and I put finished videos onto DVDs to store them.

In a year I collect about another TB of raw footage and another 50GB of finished videos.

This saves space and helps with finding where in hell anything is.

 

[Stingerxxx]

It all depends on how much "alot" is, and how long you intend to keep this video stored for. If you're recording, lets say, 2 hours a day and you keep a months worth of video stored, on average 2 hours takes up about 1.5-2gb, depending on the format and compression rates. 2 hours could potentially take up twice that amount or more. But lets stick with 1hr=1gb. At this rate, you would be able to manage quite well with 6tb. 2x7=14gb x4 =56gb. Easily enough. However, something tells me you might be recording more. The best way to know is to do it, in all honesty. Decide for how long you want to keep a record for. Consider cloud storage as an option. Spend a week recording at the rate you plan on doing it at. After one week note the total GB size of all videos. Multiply by how long you plan on keeping them for. That will give you a rough answer.

If you plan on keeping two years or more worth of storage.... At the rates I have calculated, you will have 1.344 TB built up. That's two hours a day. Every day. At 1gb per hour. (I come up with this number considering videos compressed into .MP4 format by looking at movies in 1080p. Guardians of the Galaxy has a total runtime of 120 minutes, convenient in this case. It's total size after all is said and done is 1.85 GB. It is in .MP4 format, at least the digital copy that I own.)

 

[Alabalcho]

Drives (being they mechanical or SSD) do fail, some of them in a week, some of them in five years. 6TB is a lot of data to lose, so plan for your backup as well.