• While the return type of hashbytes might be 8000 bytes, that's more for future proofing, the actual value length will be:

    Allowed input values are limited to 8000 bytes. The output conforms to the algorithm standard: 128 bits (16 bytes) for MD2, MD4, and MD5; 160 bits (20 bytes) for SHA and SHA1; 256 bits (32 bytes) for SHA2_256, and 512 bits (64 bytes) for SHA2_512.

    from http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms174415.aspx

    so your absolute longest using one of the currently supported hashes, is going to be 64 bytes, so your actual storage should be 66 bytes. And you could save those two bytes by doing a cast to a fixed length binary since you will know what algorithm you will be using.