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NAS Storage for Photos Calculator

Plan how much NAS storage your photo and video library will need over years, including RAID redundancy overhead, so you buy the right drives once.

Photos per year

Average photo size

Video hours per year

Video size per hour

Years to plan for

RAID redundancy

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How it works

Per year = photos × MB ÷ 1000 + video hr × GB/hr · Usable = per year × years · Raw = usable × RAID factor (1, 2, or 4⁄3)

Photo libraries grow steadily, so size a NAS for years ahead, not today. Yearly volume is your photo count times average file size plus video hours times per-hour size; multiply by the years you want to cover for total usable data. RAID then multiplies that: a mirror (RAID 1) doubles the raw drives you buy, while RAID 5 spends one drive of every group on parity — here about a third extra on a four-drive set. Buying the raw figure means the array still has room after redundancy is carved out.

Worked example

5,000 JPEGs at 6 MB is 30 GB, plus 20 hours of 8 GB/hr video is 160 GB, for 190 GB a year. Over 10 years that is 1.9 TB of usable data; on a RAID 1 mirror you buy 2× that, about 3.8 TB of raw drives — so a pair of 4 TB disks fits with headroom.

Frequently asked questions

How big are RAW photos versus JPEG?

A JPEG from a modern camera or phone is typically 3–8 MB; an uncompressed or lightly compressed RAW file runs 20–50 MB depending on the sensor. If you shoot RAW, set the average size accordingly — it can multiply your storage needs five-fold over JPEG-only.

Does RAID replace a backup?

No. RAID protects against a drive failing, not against deletion, ransomware, theft or fire. Treat the NAS as one copy and keep a separate backup — ideally following a 3-2-1 rule with an offsite copy — so a single event cannot lose your library.

Why buy more drives than my data size?

Redundancy costs capacity: a mirror stores every byte twice, and parity RAID reserves whole drives for recovery data. Buying only your usable figure would leave nothing for the protection, so the raw purchase is always larger than the library itself.

Related calculators

Photo & Video Storage Calculator

Size the drive or cloud plan your media library needs — JPEG/HEIC and RAW photos plus video by resolution and frame rate turned into gigabytes, with growth over the years, headroom, backup copies, the size Windows shows, a drive-fit table and upload time.

3-2-1 Backup Storage Calculator

Work out the storage a 3-2-1 (or 3-2-1-1-0) backup plan needs: copies, version history or a daily/weekly/monthly retention schedule, compression and dedup, data growth, drive sizes, cloud cost and upload time.

Database Storage Estimate Calculator

Estimate a table’s storage from its row count, average row size and index overhead — data size, index size and total disk footprint.

Backup Window Calculator

Work out how long a backup or data transfer takes from the data size, throughput, transfer efficiency and any compression — and whether it fits your window.

This calculator is for educational purposes. Double-check important results before acting on them.