Tile disk usage

Average tile size is 633 B on tile - March 2011.

OSM does NOT pre-render every tile. Pre-rendering all tiles would use around 54 TB of storage. As the following table shows, the majority of tiles are never viewed. In fact just 1.79% are viewed. It works out this way because the majority of tiles are at zoom level 18 and actually the majority contain nothing of interest. By following an on-the-fly rendering approach we can avoid rendering these tiles unnecessarily. The tile view count column shows how many tiles have been produced on the OSM Tile server.

Historic yevaud server (link no longer available) disk usage: 1272 GB used. (6 January 2012). (z0 to z15: 252 GB, z16 to z18: 1020 GB). As of 9 June 2017: 1250 GB (z0-15: 460 GB, z16-19: 790 GB). For current disk usage see munin disk usage for odin server. Note that disk usage is dynamic: you can get less than 1 TB or more than 2 TB, depending on your caching settings. See also current requirements for tile rendering servers (19 September 2020: 1.5 TB of space for z0-z19 tiles).

To calculate a number of tiles for an area and an approximate size for these, try Geofabrik Tile Calculator.

Zoom	Tile view count	Maximum (4^zoom)	% viewed on tile (March 2011)	% stored on tile server (November 2015)
0	1	1	100	100
1	4	4	100	100
2	16	16	100	100
3	64	64	100	100
4	256	256	100	100
5	1,024	1,024	100	100
6	4,096	4,096	100	100
7	16,384	16,384	100	100
8	65,536	65,536	100	100
9	262,144	262,144	100	100
10	1,048,576	1,048,576	100	100
11	4,194,304	4,194,304	100	100
12	13,475,072	16,777,216	80.32	100
13	35,640,512	67,108,864	53.11	93.184
14	87,820,928	268,435,456	32.72	43.748
15	163,872,384	1,073,741,824	15.26	26.061
16	287,448,064	4,294,967,296	6.69	11.719
17	429,535,936	17,179,869,184	2.50	4.892
18	617,515,264	68,719,476,736	0.90	0.258
19	-	274,877,906,944	-	0.023
Total	1,640,900,565	366,503,875,925	1.79