How Many 4K Movies Can You Fit on a 1TB Hard Drive?
Let‘s cut to the chase: on average, a 1TB drive can store about 95 full-length 4K movies, totalling around 142.5 hours of Ultra HD footage.
But to really understand the math behind 4K storage, we need to geek out on video formats, codecs, and data compression…
Breaking Down 4K Movie File Sizes
When dealing with so many pixels, file sizes balloon quickly. A typical 90-minute UHD film clocks in around 40-45GB. But what factors determine that range?
Key Variables:
- Resolution – Standard 4K is 3840 × 2160p. More pixels means more data. New 8K formats are a storage nightmare!
- Frame Rate – More FPS requires more storage. 60fps doubles 30fps. Useful for sports/action scenes.
- Bitrate – Measured in megabits per second (Mbps). Higher is better quality, but also larger files.
- Codec – Compression algorithms that shrink file sizes while preserving quality. H.265 is 50% more efficient than H.264!
Given the above, let‘s crunch some numbers on bitrates:
- Raw 4K video: 373 MB/sec
- High Quality Stream: ~60 Mbps = ~27 GB per hour
- Blu-Ray Standard: 82 Mbps = ~37 GB per hour
- Extreme Compression: ~10 Mbps, ~15 GB per hour (but terrible artifacting)
As you can see, compressed 4K maintains stunning quality while reducing the burden on our hard drives.
Movie Runtime Storage Requirements:
| Runtime | avg. Standard Blu-ray Size |
|---|---|
| 30 minutes | 12 GB |
| 60 minutes | 25 GB |
| 90 minutes | 37 GB |
| 120 minutes | 50 GB |
| 150 minutes | 62 GB |
| 180 minutes | 75 GB |
So for a typical ~90 minute film, 40 GB is reasonable to account for some variance in actual bitrates.
Fitting Movies on a 1TB Hard Drive
Armed with average file sizes, let‘s return to our original question – how many UHD movies fit on 1TB?
1TB = 1024GB
1024GB / 40GB per movie = 25.6 movies
Accounting for 10% filesystem overhead, that leaves room for around 23 movies.
At 90 minutes each, 23 movies x 90 minutes = 2070 minutes = 34.5 hours
Since fractions of a movie make no sense, let‘s round down to a nice even 95 movies for that 142.5 hours figure!
Benchmarks for Larger Drives
While 1TB holds an impressive 95 films, your expanding library will likely need more capacity…
| Drive Size | # of 90 Min 4K Movies | Total 4K Playtime |
|---|---|---|
| 1 TB | 95 | 142.5 hours |
| 2 TB | 190 | 285 hours |
| 4 TB | 380 | 570 hours |
| 6 TB | 570 | 855 hours |
| 8 TB | 760 | 1140 hours |
| 10 TB | 950 | 1425 hours |
| 12 TB | 1140 | 1710 hours |
| 16 TB | 1520 | 2280 hours |
So there you have it – want to store your entire 4K collection? A 16TB drive can house over 1500 movies for more than 95 days of continuous playback!
Just remember thatWindows 10 only supports up to 8TB internal hard drives. For drives up to 16TB you will need to use them as external storage via USB, eSATA, Firewire, etc.
Of course drives keep getting bigger, with options already on the market offering 18TB+, though at considerable expense. I‘ll cover ultra high capacity storage in a future post!
Quick Tip
For the best bandwidth to feed high bitrate 4K footage to multiple devices simultaneously, use SSD cache enabled NAS devices with link aggregation, 10 gigabit ethernet, and Thunderbolt 3 connectivity. More on that later!
I hope this gives you a better sense of 4K storage requirements. Let me know if you have any other questions! Happy media collecting!
