Storage and retention

Capacity planning for Blocao Cells.

Bitrate budget

Default policy: dual-stream recording per camera.

Stream	Resolution	Codec	Bitrate	Use
Main	1080p @ 15fps	H.265	~2.0-2.5 Mbps	Event-triggered clips
Sub	480p @ 5fps	H.265	~280-400 Kbps	Continuous recording

Per camera, per day:

Main (event-triggered, ~10% activity): ~2.0 Mbps × 86400s × 10% = ~2.0 GB
Sub (continuous): ~0.3 Mbps × 86400s = ~3.2 GB
Subtotal: ~5.2 GB/cam/day
With 90% efficiency for fragmentation/index: ~5.8 GB/cam/day

Retention math

Cameras	Days	Total	Recommended disk
4	30	~700 GB	NVMe 500GB hot + HDD 2TB cold
8	30	~1.4 TB	NVMe 500GB hot + HDD 4TB cold
8	60	~2.8 TB	NVMe 1TB hot + HDD 4TB cold
8	90	~4.2 TB	NVMe 1TB hot + HDD 6TB cold
16	30	~2.8 TB	NVMe 1TB hot + HDD 6TB cold
16	90	~8.4 TB	NVMe 2TB hot + HDD 12TB cold

Numbers include 10% buffer for fragmentation and indexing.

Hot/cold tiering

Frigate writes to the hot tier (NVMe). A nightly job moves files older than 7 days to the cold tier (HDD). The hot tier is the working set: recent events, today's queries.

The cold tier holds the rest of retention. HDDs preferred for cold:

WD Purple (surveillance-rated): 4TB, 6TB, 8TB sweet spot.
Seagate SkyHawk (also surveillance-rated): equivalent.
Avoid consumer drives (e.g. WD Blue): they're not rated for 24/7 write workloads.

NVMe options:

Samsung 990 Pro or Crucial T700: high endurance, MLC.
500GB minimum; 1TB recommended for sites with >8 cameras.

Buffer policy

Soft and hard limits on disk usage:

% used	Status	Action
< 75%	Healthy	Normal operation
75-85%	Soft limit	Alert in HEALTH panel; oldest events flagged for removal
85-95%	Hard limit	Aggressive pruning of low-importance events; warning in SYNOPSIS
> 95%	Critical	Stop writing new clips, only keep in-memory; alert at hub level

The evidence locker is a separate partition with its own quota. Pinned-to-case clips move there and are not subject to retention rotation. Default evidence locker: 100GB on NVMe.

Encryption

LUKS on both NVMe and HDD partitions.

Key management:

Default: key file on the Cell, protected by hardware secure element when available (RK3588 has a Cryptographic Engine — not currently used; planned for hardening).
Customer BYOK: customer-supplied key, sealed by Tang+Clevis or HashiCorp Vault.

The encryption is at rest only. Frigate works on plaintext within RAM and over LAN inside VLAN-20.

Backup considerations

Per-site backup is not the default — most customers don't want extra disks at every site. Options:

No backup: accept the 30-day window as the SLA. If the Cell dies, data lost.
Hub mirror: events and embeddings replicate to hub; raw video doesn't. Customer can reconstruct history via embeddings + bring back from a pinned-case archive.
Customer-side rsync: nightly cron pushes evidence locker only to customer's NAS.

For Argentina banking deployments (BCRA 90-day retention), option 2 is the typical answer. The hub holds enough metadata to prove "events occurred at time X" even if the raw clip is lost.

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