While the minimum requirements for storage are shown as 500 GB, your specific requirements may be less or more depending on the size of your media library and your archive of student responses.
By Gerry Sullivan
Date of Creation: 2019-11-23
Last Update: 2023-02-17
Audio Clips
One minute of SmartClass digitized audio for media files requires 1,444 KB of storage space, so we can characterize this as about 1.4 MB per minute. One minute of SmartClass digitized audio for student responses requires 1.292 KB of storage space, so we can characterize this as about 1.3 MB per minute (without ADPCM compression) or approximately 340 KB per minute (with ADPCM compression).
Note that when variable speed recording is used with HUB audio clip media files, separate file images are kept for each available speed. In a worst-case scenario, this can increase audio storage requirements by up to 5X.
Video Clips
One minute of SmartClass digitized video requires 4,116 KB of storage space, so we can characterize this as about 4.1 MB per minute. (There is actually some variation in space requirements depending on the format of the original video files, but this should average out overall.)
Overall Storage Requirements
For a typical class session, we might assume that the teacher uses 10 minutes of audio-visual content, with 50% being audio and 50% being video. This yields a storage requirement of 27.5 MB per class (uncompressed) or 22.2 MB (with ADPCM compression).
Also, for a typical class session, let us assume that students are recording individual responses for about 10 minutes per class, and let us assume that we have 30 students. This yields a storage requirement of 390 MB per class (uncompressed) or 97.5 MB per class (with ADPCM compression).
The aggregate storage requirements for each class session are therefore about 417.5 MB (uncompressed) or about 109.75 MB (with ADPCM compression). We can also express this as 0.42 GB (uncompressed or 0.11 GB (compressed).
If there is one class per week and recordings must be saved for a complete school year, (e.g. 40 class sessions), then each class will require (40 x 0.42 = 16.8 GB uncompressed), or about (40 x 0.11 = 4.4 GB compressed).
If there are 10 different language classes (e.g. English 101A, French 102B, etc.) that run each school term, then the server must provide at least (10 x 16.8 = 168 GB) of storage capacity (uncompressed) or (10 x 4.4 = 44 GB) of storage capacity (compressed).
Use the guidelines provided in the above example to calculate how much storage space is required on your media server.
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