Hello @aer4af ,
Welcome to the forum!
This is not mining, adding hardware would not have a significant effect on usage, because it’s used by real people, not machines. There are some exceptions like using the network connected drives for storage or SMR drives or use devices with too low RAM (less than 500MB), which can significant lower income because such hardware become a bottleneck, however the minimum recommended specifications you can see there: Prerequisites - Node Operator
Each new node must be vetted. While in vetting your node can receive only 5% of customers’ uploads until got vetted. To be vetted on one satellite, the node should pass 100 audits from it. For the one node in the /24 subnet of public IPs this should take at least a month. If you would start several nodes (or you have neighbors in the same subnet of public IPs), the vetting could take longer.
You can use this Earnings calculator (Update 2021-06-11: v10.2.1 - Detailed payout information: Now includes comparison to actual payout, postponed payouts due to threshold and transaction links!) to check your vetting progress.
All nodes in the same /24 subnet of public IPs treated as a one node for uploads (ingress) and as a separate ones for downloads (egress) by the customers’, audit and uptime checks - we want to be decentralized as much as possible.
You can use this Realistic earnings estimator to have an idea how long it may take to fill-up all free space and how much you may earn.
In short - this is a long run project. It’s better to use hardware which will be online anyway - with Storj or without, thus any income would be a pure profit and nice discount to your bills.
We don’t recommend to make any investments only for Storj - you could have no ROI any time soon.