I see this discussion derailed from my original topic.
Let me quote one of the posts by a storjling:
The short explanation is that the earning potential of a node, our network performance and - most important - file durability are all strongly affected by node operator reliability.
Not the node reliability but the operator. And I wholeheartedly agree with this distinction.
I suspect that it’s the human operator who most often ruins the node by e.g. disconnecting the USB cable from the running computer, wiping the file system on a wrong device, etc.
In the original post I described a situation when my brand new drive may fail and ruin the whole old node. However this is the only reasonable course of action for me even though I’d prefer to keep the node on the already proven device (which doesn’t guarantee the reliability but we are not talking about it at this moment).
This is the kind of situation where my benefits as an SNO contradict benefits of the network.
P.S. I can even imagine a business of raising a fleet of lean (500GB or even lower by artificially slowing down uploads when fully vetted) vetted nodes with 9 months age (starting from 10th month SNOs get 100%). And then selling them for a profit. Held amount will be marginal and will not nearly cover repair costs for the newly stored data. But that’s what the node vs operation “reliability” is currently about.
I’m slightly exaggerating, of course, but only a bit.