Is the calculator still available?
I can build a server for 400 GBP that has 10 x 3TB drives, if I use raid 6 this will leave me with 24TB usable.
Does this make economic sense?
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Depends on your electricity costs. 10 drives is a lot for 24tb available. If you would just buy a raspberry pi and add two 12TB external drives, you have much lower electricity costs.
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Check this maybe:
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No, you will have months until it covers electricity costs.
I just fainted! I did the calculation (see info below) ā¦ it could cost Ā£1,200 per year in electricity!!!
I never realised it was so significant. I looked up the cost of 2 x 12TB and thought āI can buy a lot of electricity for thatā ā¦ how wrong I was!
For instance, one server can use between 500 to 1,200 watts per hour, according to Ehow.com. If the average use is 850 watts per hour, multiplied by 24 that equals 20,400 watts daily, or 20.4 kilowatts (kWh). Multiply that by 365 days a year for 7,446 kWh per year.
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Yes but for Storj you donāt really need a powerful server as the service is not very cpu intensive. A raspberry pi uses between 4,5 and 6 watt and one HDD usually around 6 watt.
So Raspberry + 2xHDD would be 18 watt max.
Thatās 0,432 kWh per day or 157 kWh per year.
In Germany thatās ~ 50ā¬ per year then. From my experience so far I can say that this is profitable. This month alone I will make 40 $ with currently only 13 TB stored.
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Well then it depends on which server you build. The main advantage of having an server is flexibility, you can add more drives easily and run other stuff on it as well. I donāt think everyone needs a home server but if you have one and you like messing around with things I bet youāll have other stuff running on it pretty fast haha.
As @striker43 said, Storj isnāt very CPU intensive so you can go with a low power CPU. Any motherboard should have at least 4 SATA ports so youāre good up to 64TB with 16TB hard drives (about the maximum capacity for a node at average ingress/delete levels).
I think itās doable to build a server that pulls between 50-60W at idle and get all the benefits with added flexibility and functionality.
Of course if you just want to get your feet wet running a node on a raspberry pi is the way to go in my opinion.
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There is no such thing as āwatts per hourā. If a server uses 500 watt (power) for one hour it has used 500 Wh (watt hours) of energy. Thatās 12 kWh daily.
Iād recommend measuring the power usage of your actual server. 500-1200W is probably way way higher than your serverās power usage. My Ryzen 7 server with 7 disks and 3 SSDs draws ~80W at 30% load.
What I like a lot is that Google can do computations with units. For example, 500 watt * 1 year * (0.12 USD / kWh) ā any mistake is then clear.
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850 Wh is a lot. do you use 15k rpm ultra320 scsi disks in that server with a 3GHz pentium 4?
and 16 fans screaming at 30k rpm?
in that caseā¦ get yourself something more recent please! or go the Rpi way!
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I totally agree that RPI are kinda cool, but i think they are an over represented option, of an expensive, yet actually kinda weak, low feature platform that is better suited as a controller for a diy project.
iām pretty sure i would get something else, with options for changing ram, adding a pcie card and suchā¦ and sure i will pay some extra power for thatā¦ but then iām not stuck the first time some new piece of hardware or software comes around and changes the requirementsā¦
sure you wonāt find anything using less power reallyā¦ because itās basically smartphone technology, and without a doubt much of future of computation is in thatā¦
but what if you decide you want to hook up 10-20 harddrivesā¦ a RPI will never do thatā¦ and thus your 100$ or whatever you spend on the RPI will maybe give you 2-4 hddās ofc you can go beyond most likelyā¦ but at one point you will reach a point where the cpu is simply to feeble to actually sort through the data, and i doubt it will be a high numberā¦
and iām sure RPIās are right for someā¦
but way to over represented in a world where we have like 1500 different options for palm size computers
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This is always choice between costs and profit.
For my opinion the RPI is suitable for the project, since it costs not so much and uses a low power. It could buy itself within a less than a year.
I personally like the Odroid HC2 design:
or
I would like to build something like this, but my available Ethernet outlets not in the good places:
- one in bedroom;
- the second in the guest room/kitchen 1.5 meters from the floor (there is TV
, which is not used and collects the dust ).
Perhaps I could place it behind a TV 
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The odroid H2 has 2 SATA ports and costs around 110$, a far way from the best as of flexibility but at least you donāt have all the problems with USB drives unmounting.
Iām running my 8TB node on an odroid HC2 and itās really good, very low footprint and power consumption, It also has an extra usb port so I could hook up an external drive. Also itās headless so it forced me to get familiar with command line and thatās something Iāve always wanted to do.
Sure it can only accommodate one drive so the $/TB ratio is higher that for a server buy my plan was to set up nodes at my friends so that they are on different /24 subnets. Weāll see if I do that, mainly depends on how traffic evolves over time.
A good estimate is GBP per year = 2 x watts
i.e. a 100W server costs Ā£200 a year to run.
(datacentre 3 x)
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i know this is state of the art basicallyā¦
but still the power profile of this with a small athlon cpu, gives one near regular computer expansion options, tech thats not out dated for 5-6 years easy, ofc with some upgradesā¦ and one can throw some super ryzen in it in the futureā¦
there are many options, and i would say that one can get something equal or better than RPI for the same prices.
i like the Odroid design, but i donāt like that they perform worse when compared with RPI even if having the same hardwareā¦ i think it wasā¦
but itās just such a massive research project to really setup a perfect system for storjā¦ imo
and i donāt need any new hardware so canāt really be botheredā¦
but RPI i think are just a bit to smallā¦ but really anything with sata ports isnāt totally badā¦
ofc itās nice to have some more features and expansion options also
i like modular systems rather that All in one with no options for modifications and then after a couple of years itās out dated because it wasnāt that powerful to begin with and one just trashes itā¦
thats what i really donāt like about the RPI
difficult not to like something that can run on a few watts tho
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Didnāt really look into their performance but itās no big deal for me since Iāll only run one node on mine.
well it might be down to them having to manage sata features also, while the RPI has sata as addon and thus doesnāt have to spend anything on dealing with thatā¦
complex stuff 
odroidās look really coolā¦
What energy provider charges 23p for 1 kWH in the UK? Itās more like half of that. I pay 12.68p/kWh.
I think you are asking why x2? (and x3 for datacentre)
Itās just a saying.
Is it? And itās also wrong. Itās closer to 1x.