It was fun while it lasted

As my ISP is causing me issues my node is likely to fail soon.

Having run a test node with 800GBytes of storage for 2 months now it’s clear that for general data the income per Tbyte of storage is way lower than anything predicted by Storj. It’s likely that if I was able to keep the node running long term the average income would increase a little due to the fact that other node operators are likely to pull their plugs due to low income and so start to generate additional repair data requests.

For anyone looking to try and build a large node, you should take a look at the

 WD_BLACK 12 TB D10 Game Drive for Xbox One 7200RPM

This is a USB drive, that while aimed at the Xbox One market is reported to use the Western Digital DC HC520 drive, which is an enterprise-grade drive.

If it was not for my ISP issues this may have been my next R&D project as it would have gone rather well with my Pi 4.

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Hello, sad to see you go because of a shitty ISP, hope you can join the Storj Network again someday!
And for your HDD recommendation , that’s a great a find, I will take a closer look at those kind of “gaming” USB HDD in the future :).

Disqualification for downtime is currently disabled:

running a node for 2 months and expecting it to make profit is basically impossible…

expect a minimum run to be 15 months…

I said nothing about making a profit - the monthly return is low and far lower than any estimates provided to node operators by Storj it is as simple as that.

If Storj expects to grow with deals such as the one with MongoDB, node operators can expect to see very little egress income as any good backup process will be using Storj as a n-tier off-site location for DR rather than having any general plans to do restores from it. Planning around any income from repair traffic is problematic as you are making long term plans based on the instability of the overall platform.

The reason why I was looking at a 12TB drive before my ISP started to mess me around is because that is the type of capacity I would need to to provide to breakeven over 18 months at the rate of income I am seeing at the moment. Even then it’s still a fun hobby project to see how things work as you can’t factor in the possible things that could cause a single non-reduandent node to go off-line during such a long time frame.

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The issue with my ISP at the moment is far more no line than downtime. It is currently involving regulators, third party arbitration and a threat to pull the line :frowning:

yeah it’s certainly not lucrative or fast going… but maybe that will change… gave me an excuse to buy and old server…

downtime is also allowed… afaik even DQ from downtime is fairly lenient…when it becomes a thing… :smiley:

At the moment it’s not just down time that is the issue for me, rather that my provider has threatened me with a disconnect while I try and raise issues via the regulator and the formal third party arbitration process (while still paying my bills).

Node downtime is not so much of an issue, but currently the platform is missing an alert system, which would be handy as storj has automated things like updates, which could go wrong. To have any level of certainty over an 18 month time frame you do not normally start with a single Pi4, connected to single mechanical drive, a consumer router and a consumer grade power supply.

Each of our end nodes conform to what is known as Sod’s law in British culture that reads as “if something can go wrong, it will”. The redundancy is at the system level, but that is no comfort to the node operator if it is their node that fails.

Is your ISP upset about your bandwidth usage because you are running a node?

God no, currently my average daily combined Egress and Ingress Storj traffic is about 1.1GBytes. As the link is 350/36Mbit this is all just random noise.

The battle is over a 2 month delay in installation, due to issues with their infrastructure.

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OK just checking. In the past I’ve heard stories of ISPs going after customers that use too much bandwidth when they are on a residential plan. Nothing related to storj though and it’s been a while since I’ve heard of this. Hopefully this is becoming more rare as using a ton of data becomes more of the norm with all the TV streaming services, cloud backups, and online games that use 50+ GB just for an update.

@Mark
well 50gb today isn’t really anything… i mean with my connection i often push through hundred of gb in either direction every day…

i have been fearing that i will one day get a notice that i will have to move to a enterprise connection… :smiley: but luckily not yet… a 350mbit thats like 40mb/s down 3600sec in an hour so 164000 mb an hour , so 3280000+1/5 … so like 3.6tb in a day.
then one can really piss them off quick running continually at those speeds… lol

depending on how slow their real network is the issue is either bandwidth usage or did you get hacked…

it also becomes difficult to actually max out 500mbit or 1gbit… i mean one can do that… but for a bit… its just so much data one can only max it if redirecting it…