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Storage Node Operators
#121

This is only my investment. Yes, I know, it’s not recommended, but I was willing to try and do not mind if I would have no ROI, because I planned to use it in my other projects anyway.

Item Price Quantity Sum
Raspberry Pi X830 V2.0 3.5 Inch SATA HDD Storage Expansion Board with Power Supply/Adapter for Raspberry Pi 3 Model B+(Plus)/3B $40.69 1 $40.69
Raspberry Pi X830 3.5 Inch HDD SATA Storage Board Matching Metal Case/Enclosure + Power Control Switch + Cooling Fan Kit $22.89 1 $22.89
New Original Raspberry Pi 3 Model B + Raspberry Pi Raspberry Pi3 B Plus Pi 3 Pi 3B With WiFi & Bluetooth $37.89 1 $37.89
WD Blue™ WD20EZRZ 2ТБ 3,5" 5400RPM 64МB (SATA-III) $64.75 1 $64.75
Transcend microSDHC 16GB Class 10 + ADP $10.53 1 $10.53
Total - - $176.75

I risked with this and I got lucky - it paid itself twice. However I would not recommend to repeat my experiment unless you do not mind to lose those money in a bad case/bad luck.

#122

With test data and surge? If test data is here to stay, then I have no further worries.

#123

yes, earnings with surge and test data are not real, I fully understand if recent SNOs leave because they are not getting enough payment

#124

There is no guarantee either test data or surge. Since I do not have to pay for hardware, I don’t care.
The PC in the mentioned thread is 7 years old, it’s paid itself too a long time ago and will be online until die. Because my family cannot imagine itself without it.
So, I have a nice discount to my bills (electricity 100%, plus 10%-20% of home bills)

#125

Thank you for setting it straight. That is what I thought, we should not assume that the test data or surge will continue forever.

#126

I think at least test data will be there almost indefinitely.
Someone testing integration, someone store backups, other media library or time-series data


There is plenty space for every usage. So, the space will be needed anyway.
And if we take into account IoT, then there is a ocean of data.
Just use the Community estimator and you will be ok:

#127

I can only partially agree with you here. You can’t run storj without hardware, so hardware you run it on is an investment.
Sure, many SNOs run storj on hardware that’s already up and running, on drives they already have. But not considering every aspect of it is just wrong. Otherwise you can’t say you profit from your hardware, you could be exchanging its useful life for storj payments and there is no guarantee that the exchange is profitable for you.
Another point one needs to consider is whether to maintain storj when hard drives or other hardware needs to be replaced. If profits gained on earlier “free” hardware are not significant enough, one may decide that storj is not worth it.

So profitability concerns are valid.

Please. This is $13.2/TB*month.

2 Likes
#128

If you have a hardware already, it’s not an investment. It’s already bought for other purpose.
How you can consider it in the earnings from Storj? Why not from the initial purpose?

The only specific my personal investments in my hardware was the RPI3. It was not recommended, but I was willing to try, as many here.

And my risk is already covered and I’m happy that I did that. It doesn’t use a lot of electricity, and do not demand my attention. However, I would not recommend to do it so, unless you do not mind to lose a money on that in a bad case or have a other ways to use it (I have had).

By the way, I should open a sofa and vacuum it from the dust…
Some day…

So, I can assume that you made your own decision and made the investment, even if we told you not to… Then you should take a risk as of any investment as your sole decision.

1 Like
#129

Say, you have a pi3 in a case ($35 used), a drive ($40 used), a bunch of hardware to connect the drive and power the pi ($20 used).
You could sell the hardware you own instead of running the node and have $95 in your pocket.

Would this choice make sense?
Let’s take the expected $2.5 per TB and multiply it by 16 months and 2TB of space you have on your hard drive. 2.5*16*2 = 80.

Yes, it would make sense. If not for surge payments, you would need 6 more months to ROI on hardware and a bit more to pay for electricity. If an unfortunate event happened before that, you would be at loss.

This math should happen in the head of anyone starting a new node. Hardware is an asset, it has a price, one needs to consider it no matter how one obtained the asset.

You’re correct. I’m not complaining, I invested a total of four drives, valued $120 each on the local market, when I started the nodes. Instead of selling the drives I allocated them to storj. Nodes are too young for ROI, but the numbers so far are acceptable. This month is especially good, if it keeps up nodes will meet ROI earlier than anticipated.

3 Likes
#130

I am also a little disappointed with the storj’s earnings. But I have a machine connected 24 hours with space and idle processing, does anyone have any suggestion to rent it out beyond the store?

#131

you can look at golem which lets you rent cpu power but it really depends on the processing power of your machine.

1 Like
#132

Hi Alexey, I don’t want disrespect you in any way, just want to put some pointers.

I understand that there are many angry newbies that feel “they got scammed”
And you as a one of more active people here can get tired or maybe even angry at their “constant bashing of STORj” and you want to prove them it CAN be profitable.
And as usual those dialogues can get really heated, really fast :bomb:

So I just wanted to make some pointers, that it might be dangerous to bring your statements as “proof”
As you (probably) and many other on this forum said in different threads on this topic
"PAST performance is no INDICATION of a FUTURE RESULTS. Results may vary"
All I mean that given your position in the forum (“Leader”) it brings more “authority” behind your words. And it should be used with a lot of care.

Especially if you use in your statement word “invest” - because STORj says “don’t invest” :confused: - this brings up confusion (in me - newbie, and maybe others) to the topic of investing or not.

I would like to make this suggestion, that your “statement” could be quoted as -

I risked $176 and I GOT LUCKY - it paid itself twice - it is really great for me, and I am sad to hear that your results are different.

Because you are putting your claim as proof of validity, but it also puts expectations for newbies and this is not guarantee of a future result.

I would say that it has to be stressed in as many places as it possibly can be stressed (meaning also the calculator page, or maybe even each statements done by “STORjLings”).
That STORj is not endorsing any investing in this “as a business model” and if you decide to invest, invest only money that you are willing or can afford to loose.

I didn’t want to offend anyone, let me hear from you how you took it. It is important for me to hone my skills in writing, so to keep my writing as respectful as it can be.
:vulcan_salute:

8 Likes
#133

The easiest solution would be to fix that damn earnings calculator once and for all.
Can’t be too hard to change a few formulas on a webpage when you’ve been building the future of decentralized storage hahaha

6 Likes
#134

First of all I want to give you this :arrow_down:
virtual hug

I want to thank you for putting forth your thoughts/pointers in such a professional way that I couldn’t help myself but send you that hug. There are some folks that can learn a lot from how you structured your post.

I agree it gets annoying to read some posts complaining about small stuff but SNOs have the right to ask questions and responsible individuals respond to those questions to the best of their ability (Storjlings). Even though I partially agree with what you said about Storj recommending not to invest but people invest in things they understand and believe to be fruitful. The same logic that people use while buying stocks. There are risks involved in everything we do, even simple things like crossing a road.

I personally don’t think Alexey’s usage of the term “invest” is inaccurate in any way because he studied the project, took time to understand it then pour his money in it. This can be rephrased as he “invested” his time and money in the project which is how many of us speak.

No investment is risk-free but he wanted to point out how much he has invested and the returns on the said investment.

Also please know I am in no way trying to speak for him, just pointing out my understanding of his post.

You did great IMO and please continue to do the same. :sparkling_heart:

7 Likes
#135

i have to agree with @shoofar here, and what does leader even suppose to mean in this case…

does that mean you @Alexey are the most active person on the forum, or that you are employed by storj by has a job related to the management of the forum, or is it an attempt to describe your editorial tasks on the forum, that you are the leader of storj…

i find the term quite confusing atleast when applied to a forum

that doesn’t make any sense tho, without the past you wouldn’t have any way to understand the future… so tho i do agree that one alexey and high older node information isn’t very useful for new nodes and with accounting for surge payouts and that alexey most likely works for storj, i does makes it seem very oroboros…

why is it a risk… is storj going to go bankrupt… no… is his computer going to blow up… no… not very likely… is his harddisk going to die… most likely not the first few years…

so lets see… what is required to run a storagenode… by the documentation 1 core pr node…
so lets call that 10 watts … thats what my decade old cpu uses… and a hdd uses max 10watts
then lets say the internet connection is existing in the first place as this is rarely the main concern for storj it seems… atleast for now

so 20watts and what can we get for that well from 500gb (minimum allowed) to what 18 or 20tb today… okay so what would our numbers be… well i got my own numbers to look at…

from the last 4 months
watts used… * hours in a month (using 24*30 =720)
720x20 = 14400watts used in a month… aka 14.4Kwh with a price about 1/3 of a euro pr kwh

so lets just call it an even 5€ for the month…
so thats the investment and now lets calculate the possible return…

or i’m going to grab my node’s numbers…

1st month. march - payout was 2.74$ and 8.22$ held back.
2nd month april - payout was 3,61$ and 10.83$ held back
3rd month may - payout was 5.50$ and 16.50$ held back…

so already in the 3rd month, we can pass the running costs if we built our system for low power consumption… granted at this point in time i had 6 or more tb, so continuing the rise required lots of free space…
so lets seee what is the cost of a 6tb drive… lets say 20$ pr tb and thus 120$

so really whats the risk… that the data goes bad… well thats just poor design considerations when building your node if you think that 1 hdd can be reliable…

and so lets say you fail after 2 months… i would assume your hdd is still good… the only investment was really the time of the hardware and the electricity costs… of which even on the 1st month 50% was paid back… so that leaves you with like a 4€ investment…

and why would it be luck… storj has a proven track record first time i got paid was over 3 years ago now… sure you can make storj into an investment, but by no means does it have to be… you choose to make it into that and really if it fails then its most likely your fault also…

designing stuff is hard, we are often unable to see things from enough perspectives to account for most common failures.

i put lots of money into my storage setup and tho i do consider it an investment, then it’s most certainly not much to do with luck… i know that it will make money… and then my next angle of attack will most likely be my electricity costs, so that i can supply that with solar… also then no matter what happens, i will have a nice solar setup that can supply me with power…

sure it’s an investment… but one i know will return profits over time if i make sure that i get stuff that will last that long and if it’s correctly installed…

another thing is that the smaller the storj hdd is, the less likely on is to make money of it…
if we say 12tb drive…

then in month 4 the numbers are 9.33$ paid out
and still the power consumption is still 5$

and you can get 18tb drives… so thats when it really starts to return profits…

ofc if you setup 18x1tb drives… that gives you a cost of 180watts + the core so 190watts
which equal 136.8kwh a month which is 45$ a month or so…

in electricity costs… so really its all down to if you can or have done the math before you start…

cant just count on luck… not if you want to succeed anyways…

1 Like
#136
1 Like
#137

always know stuff makes good sense when it requires a manual xD
that only leads me to more questions… i mean… then why is there only him…
if he isn’t staff, then wouldn’t there be more like him…

or is he simply a storj pet project

ofc having multiple leaders would also be kinda confusing, but i guess it just means that he is the top tier moderator on the forum…

still i think the word is utilized in a very weird use case… doesn’t make any sense.
without a manual…

i can see the argument for using it, but i will never agree that it’s the right word to use in this regard, even tho i sort of understood what it was suppose to mean…

it does put alexey a bit in an unfortunate position when trying to educate about storj profits… difficult to be a step before the payroll and then be promoting without bias.

1 Like
#138

Its not just him there are others but he’s the one that is more active.

storjteam
storjteam1353×593 131 KB

Source: https://storj.io/team/

You should contact Discourse support.

2 Likes
#139

Thank you, I’m agree with you!
I edited my posts to add some warnings as well. This is was not suggestion, this is was my experience and opinion. I shared my experience and opinion not as a Leader, but as a SNO :slight_smile:

But you are right, it could be read as suggestion, so I modified them to point out, that it was an experiment and it was successful, but it doesn’t mean that it would be so for everyone.

7 Likes
#140

I don’t think we need to tip toe around sharing our own experience or pretend that it’s a complete gamble. Past performance is definitely an indication of what the future may hold. It’s no guarantee of course, but to pretend it’s not even an indication is just naive.

After being a node operator since February 2019, I’ve seen a trend of growing traffic over time. I’ve started out with the attitude of not wanting to invest anything at all, but I’ve seen enough to know some small investments could definitely be profitable. So while I agree that something needs to be done about the earnings estimator as that sets the wrong expectations. I think it’s nonsense to pretend like you’re buying lottery tickets here. There are good estimates out there for what you might earn. And yes every investment is a risk, but with the right information Storj is a manageable risk, with a fairly reliable reward at the other end.

I understand that storj mostly tells you to not invest in new hardware. I don’t want to tell you what to do at all. I’d prefer to just give everyone the best information available, which includes past experiences from node operators, and then let you make your own decision.

I don’t think there was anything wrong with @Alexey’s message. He just shared his own experience. In fact I think it was even a fairly modest example, considering that my node has made over $1000 already. Even if you remove the surge payouts from that, for many people that would warrant some upfront investments. In my opinion it’s a moderate risk investment with a high likelihood of a positive return. But you have to be well informed about what to expect to decide what level of investment is worth it.

It pains me to see people build expensive servers with overkill hardware. Truth is storj doesn’t need a lot and is probably best run on NAS hardware or RPi like systems. I guess cheap second hand hardware could work too as long as it’s easy on the power use. If you stick to that and don’t overspend, it’ll almost certainly be profitable. But you’re not going to get rich! It’s a fair compensation for the service you provide.

5 Likes