I’m not sure what “decreed income” means.
Yes, running a single node will get the same amount of ingress traffic as multiple nodes in the same /24 subnet. Piece uploads are divided among them for the health of the network (you don’t want two of the redundant chunks stored in the same physical location – that defeats the purpose of redundancy, especially when the network does not require redundant storage).
Correct. Right now I have a 4TB node that is running 2x4TB disks in a RAID1. But as soon as the node fills to 90%, I plan to reduce the RAID1 to 1 device and create a new node on the second disk. That is, I might as well have the redundancy while I don’t need the extra storage, but once I could profit from the extra storage I certainly will.
These problems are really only problems if you expect your disks to fail frequently.
Let’s put it another way. Depending on the capacity of your disk, it could take a certain amount of time to fill up. Let’s say that it takes 6 months to fill up.
After 15 months, all of the held escrow that will ever be paid out (without gracefully exiting the node) will have been paid out. You will never realize the remaining escrow unless you leave the network and it doesn’t sound like you plan to, so we don’t consider that escrow in this calculation. If a node is disqualified after 15 months then it will take another 6 months with a new disk of the same capacity to get back to full. Sum that to get 21 months.
So, with RAID6, if you expect two disks to fail every 21 months, yes, RAID6 is a good idea. If you expect a lower failure rate, the redundancy is wasted and you’d realize more profit by using those two disks to run their own nodes.
The ultimate question is which is larger: the lost revenue from disk failures, or the additional revenue that could be realized by using the redundant disks. This is a calculation you’d have to do based on the capacity and expected lifetime of your disks.
The smaller the disks and the less frequent the failures, the more revenue you’d get by running multiple nodes with no redundancy. On the other hand, the bigger the disks and the more frequent the failures, the more revenue you’d get by running a single node with a redundant storage configuration.