I successfully ran the installer and have one drive running. If I install additional drives, how do I add them into the software? Do I run the installer again? But even if I do, the installer only lets you select one drive.
Currently you cannot add multiple drives to a single node without RAID. Ideally you should keep 1 node per HDD. Also you shouldn’t invest in hardware just for Storj. Storj is for lending extra space on your HDD for some extra cash.
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I think multiple hdd to One node was on the ideas page and this was One of the ideas that would not happen
Official response Ideas & Suggestions - Storj Community Forum (official)
Brandon Iglesias commented 09 Sep 17:54
Hey everyone Brandon the Product Manager @storj here. Thanks for submitting this idea, Chris VdG has a point about the redundancy between raid and erasure coding. Our recommendation is to run one node per HD. This will actually spread your overall risk of a HD failing and losing the withholdings for that specific node ID. If you have 4 2 TB HDs then the best thing to do is run 1 node per HD and if one of those fails then at most you would only lose 25 percent of your overall withholdings amongst all 4 nodes. Instead of using raid to backup one of your nodes its may be in your best interest to just allocate that extra raid space to the network and profit off of it instead.
I assume you are referring to the windows installer. To my knowledge it is not possible to run more than one node using the windows installer. It is possible with docker though. So if you want to have multiple nodes for multiple disks, you might want to switch to a docker setup.
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I just set up a store node with an old quadcore + 6 1tb HD in ZFS with a big pool of a bit more of 4,2TB and I’m sharing 4TB this was old hardware getting dust, so it’s just about the power is consuming.
I rather prefer a ZFS with raidz1, and in case of a disk failing, i can just replace it in no time and the RAID would resilver and everything will be fine again in a couple of hours other that having 6 machines running 
This makes sense except for the traffic/bandwidth setting. You pretty much have to divide the available monthly traffic by the number of nodes. This risks one node reaching its limit while there is still plenty of free traffic available by other nodes that aren’t using it.
It would be great if there were some official solution to this problem.
This is why Storj recommends starting another node behind same IP IF your first node is full. Starting more than 1 node that are not full behind same IP does not make any sense.
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The first node could still use egress traffic, so this doesn’t solve the problem.
That’s a crappy architecture.
I have 16 external hard drives and 48TB total (currently doing Burst, which I want to end), and I sure as hell do not want 16 nodes, ALL using the same bandwidth.
This needs to change, really.
Hello @m3ta,
Welcome to the forum!
You can build a RAID6 or RAID10 if you want to use all that space.
Please, take a look on https://raid.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/RAID_setup
I would not recommend the RAID5 with consumers disk and 1 bad bit on 10^14
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Did you try using some kind of LVM to combine all disks into one folder?
That’s a bad idea as you would lose everything if a single disk fails.
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yeah but then you will need one device per HD?
You can always raid these drives. Can’t recommend raiding externals, but unless you got shitty 2.5" with usb on the drive itself you can shuck them and connect directly to a server. Will probably save you quite a bit of power too.
No you don’t, you can run multiple nodes on the same system.
how would that work? multiple docker containers?
Pretty much. Search these forums for multiple nodes. There are lots of posts about it.
That’s not how it works. From a bandwidth utilization perspective, running 16 3TB nodes is the same as running one 48TB node. The only significant difference from an income perspective is that the 16 nodes all have to be vetted, but you can prevent that from affecting your income by starting new nodes one a time shortly before all nodes are full.
However, if you are using multiple drives then you at least want RAID6 and then you’re reducing your capacity by two drives.
Running multiple nodes without redundancy will earn more money over time than the same amount of storage in a RAID configuration with redundancy as some capacity is wasted.
Having said that, it’s definitely easier to manage one node so there is a management benefit in doing it that way. You will make less money but spend less time managing nodes.
… But that means you only have one chance to get something right, too. If you screw up one node and it’s your only node, you have to start over. If you have 16 nodes and you screw up one, you start that node over, learn from your mistake, and still have 15 good nodes.
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Any new enhancements to make the storage node setup easier if you have multiple drives on the same windows system?
I have an old Chia mining server that has multiple drive ports and am trying to figure out how to use them easily.