Hello. I have about 10 spare 3tb hdds and an old linux system. I would like to make a node to experiment and play with. Maybe even earn some storj tokens. Any advice? Do you think i could make some profit in a few months? something is better than nothing. I will update with my setup. I hope to get it running in the next few days.
It just depends on many factors. How busy the Storj network is will determine how quickly you can fill those drives with data. If it’s data that gets pulled on a lot, you can earn more than data that isn’t. You have no control over that though. I would suggest setting up a simple node and seeing how it goes. Keep in mind that payouts happen based on how much you’ve earned and how expensive it is to send an Ethereum transaction. Lately, Ether has had crazy high fees, so a lot of Storj Node Operators are waiting to earn enough to get paid based on Storj’s payout thresholds. You do EARN tokens, but receiving them can take quite a while while these Ethereum fees are so high. (Storj does have an alternate way to get paid, which you can read more about in the various discussions here.)
Thank you for the information! I am currently mining ethereum, monero, zhash, and bitcoin too. Just simple setups to learn. I understand it will take a lot of months for the storage to fill.
I made a zfs server just to learn and for backups. I thought this would be the perfect opportunity to put it to work.
I guess the determining factor is mostly available bandwidth and location? Low latency and high bandwidth would give you priority over the others on the network? Seems similar to how bittorrent splits and distributes files.
I will look into the payout method. I read something about it. It is called something like Dksync.
Almost 
When the customer want to upload a file, its uplink encrypt the file, slice it to pieces and apply Reed-Solomon encoding, then requests 110 random nodes from the satellite and starts an upload in parallel.
When the first 80 are finished, the remained will be canceled (the cut of long tail):
So, fastest and closest to the customer will win the race. But you cannot be close to everyone customer in the world, so you cannot win all the races.