NAS Tools
Free NAS Tools & Storage Calculators
Six free tools for planning and buying private storage: calculate the capacity your photos, videos and cameras actually need, compare RAID configurations, choose a NAS configuration that fits your workload, compare verified product specifications, and plan a backup setup that survives more than a single drive failure. Every calculator shows its formula and its assumptions, and nothing here is gated behind a form.
NAS Storage Calculator
Work out how much storage your photos, videos and files actually need — with growth, reserve and RAID overhead separated instead of hand-waved.
Open the tool →RAID planningRAID Calculator
Compare RAID 0, 1, 5, 6 and 10 usable capacity, fault tolerance and trade-offs before you buy drives — mixed drive sizes handled honestly.
Open the tool →Buying guidanceNAS Selector
Answer six questions about how you work and get a configuration recommendation — bay count, network, memory and backup — with the reasoning shown.
Open the tool →SurveillanceCCTV Storage Calculator
Estimate video surveillance storage from camera count, bitrate, hours and retention — for one home camera or a forty-camera site.
Open the tool →Product researchNAS Comparison Tool
Compare verified NAS specifications side by side — every value traced to a manufacturer page and a check date; anything unverified is labelled, not guessed.
Open the tool →Data protectionNAS Backup Planner
Turn your data, importance and recovery requirements into a layered backup plan — and the honest gaps you still need to close.
Open the tool →Why the math comes first
Most NAS purchases fail in one of two directions: drives too small, bought twice; or bays too many, paid for and never filled. Both come from shopping before doing the arithmetic. The tools on this page do the arithmetic first — raw capacity versus usable capacity, growth over years, surveillance bitrates, and the difference between redundancy and backup.
Two conventions apply everywhere. Capacities use decimal units (1 TB = 1,000 GB), matching how drive manufacturers label them, so a “8 TB” drive is about 7.3 TiB in your operating system. And every result separates raw capacity (what the drives sum to) from usable capacity (what survives the RAID layout), because treating the first as the second is the single most common buying mistake.
The comparison tool draws on a specification ledger we maintain by hand: every value carries its source page and the date we checked it, and fields we have not verified are marked as such rather than estimated. Prices follow the same rule.