Enter how many movies and TV episodes you have (or plan to collect) and the quality you keep them at. The calculator estimates total storage and adds growth headroom so you buy drives once, not twice.
Enter your movie and episode counts to estimate storage.Where the size estimates come from
The per-file averages are deliberately round planning numbers, based on typical release sizes:
| Quality tier | Movie | TV episode |
|---|---|---|
| SD / 720p | ~2 GB | ~0.7 GB |
| 1080p web quality | ~5 GB | ~1.5 GB |
| 1080p remux | ~25 GB | ~7 GB |
| 4K web quality | ~15 GB | ~4 GB |
| 4K remux | ~60 GB | ~15 GB |
“Web quality” means the compressed encodes most people collect. A remux is the untouched disc stream in a new container: no quality loss, and five to ten times the size. Mixed libraries land between tiers: if you keep remuxes of favourites and web encodes of everything else, run the calculator twice and add the results.
Two gotchas when translating this into drives
Decimal TB vs. TiB. A “12 TB” drive holds 12 trillion bytes, which your OS reports as roughly 10.9 TiB. The calculator works in decimal TB, same as drive labels, but expect the formatted number on the system to read about 9% lower.
Parity is on top. If you protect the array with SnapRAID, parity drives don’t add usable space. Size them with the SnapRAID Parity & MergerFS Pool Calculator once you know your data-drive layout.
Which drives to actually buy: NAS vs. shucked externals, what to look for on the used market, and how to grow a pool over time.