How many nodes on Raspberry

Hi team,

what do you think, from the power a v4 should have possibility to host 2 or more nodes.
Maybe using an active usb hub with 8 external disks? :laughing:

Yes, thats possible :wink:

At some point USB speed is going to be the limiting factor though.

Make sure you use externally powered HDD’s and preferably a powered usb hub to prevent issues.

I’m currently running almost all my nodes on raspberry.
Most important thing which i could add here is about cooling.
I’m using the raspberry pi 4 flirc case for that - works pretty well with three nodes.

Don’t those new Pi get a 1x slot for an AIB SATA card? Depending on the revision you can hook up some drives there without any speed penalty over USB drives.

I’m currently running three nodes, two inside of the rock pi sata hat/nas kit and one 3.5 inch usb external. I have the model with 4 GB of ram, most of the time ram usage is not an issue, it only matters when there is a large in rush of new data or when the file walker is triggered. Additionally, avoiding SMR drives can help to reduce RAM utilization (the two 2.5 drives I have are SMR).

You can start with 1 x 10TB disk and come back and ask again in 2 years.

I run 10 nodes on one pi4 but these all share the same traffic so it may as well be 1 node. Why? I did it just to see

Remember that spinning those disks costs money and you probably won’t get paid for many months.

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It’s an investment either way but evn with currently low ingress of 300-400GB per month I expect my 8TB shucked drives (a new 10TB drive was just too expensive for me, even the shucked ones were already ~$180) to pay for themselves within 2 years. And that is calculated purely in USD without any speculation. So if I only got paid after one year, that’d still be fine. And if the disk fails within 2 years, I just get it replaced or my money back.
Is it wise to make such an investment? well that’s up to you :smiley: But if you use that drive for other stuff too, then it’s not so bad. You will need over a year to fill a 8TB drive, so you can actually use it for your own stuff for quite some time. By then you’ll definitely know if you want to continue/expand storj or not.
And a pi seems like a great hardware for a single hdd. alternatively use a HC2 or HC2+ since they got native SATA support.
Ultimately a pi4 should be fine with multiple nodes on multiple hdds as proven by many people.

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