Is there any need for more storage nodes?

Yes and no, if you also look current grow of the whole network is about 0.5PB/month and it is expected to rise. Officially the network is said to be growing 12%/month (which however isn’t true for last month as far as I can see). See: Storj Network Growth Plan

To speak for myself, the current state actually is that my nodes are shrinking due to some testing previous month. And that test/nonsense data is being removed over time. Nothing to worry about though, since it reached its endpoint since the day before yesterday. This might be flattering the growth number above, and also the growth of the free reported space which also is said to be increased 5PB within a month.

That said, 70PB is expected to take at maximum a year or two to be filled. But it’s expected to be much less than a year according official statements. In reality, 70PB is a reported stat: if I have a node of 5TB, I can decide to report 1TB or even 10TB. The reality probably is more nuanced: there are many node operators just adding disks over time, as soon there disks fill up.

For former Chia plotters, it might be interesting just to throw away some plots from the disks they have already running. And just start a bunch of small nodes, 1/disk. I hear many of them throwing away plots over time as soon as the nodes grow, because current RoI is much bigger on Storj. But I hope some Chia folks will pitch in here.

The reasons why not to start just a single node are plenty:

  • There is a held back payment for the first 15 months. This is true for every node starting, the sooner you start the sooner you get full payment.
  • If you start off those nodes at once, they compete for the ingress, meaning during those 15 months the ingress is being divided over all the nodes. So held back payments per node are low.
  • Since you’re dividing the ingress over more disks, the IOPS are also divided meaning less interference with also running Chia-activities.
  • If there are more nodes withing a /24-subnet (so: 255.255.255.0-part of your external address) they are being seen as one node, sharing the ingress. Meaning that you’re a bigger competitor within the subnet with more nodes, so receiving more ingress (as far as I have understood the concept, might be off on this one).
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