I saw the post about a vet leaving the community so I thought I would post about joining. I am currently running my identity script and hope to be online soon. I did not join because of the spike I was actually looking for some other ideas for shared resources online and found this and though hey that would be a fun side thing. So here I am.
I will be running a PI 4 with 5tb usb hdd
I am hoping to make at least $30 a month to pay for internet and electricity.
I do have a question, If I wanted to start with my 5gb drive and wanted to swap it out for a new 5gb drive down the line to ensure a fresh rotation of drives to reduce ware and increase reliability is this a good idea?
I like the idea of having a NAS and getting paid well but I have read everywhere not to buy equipment
You won’t earn much the first few months because the first month your node will be in vetting phase. You will get 5% traffic to see if you can store it without losing it.
That is a great setup. Cost effective and low power consumption.
You can certainly migrate your node to a newer drive and we have documentation for it.
Very true. Storj is where you lend your extra resources and make some passive income. If you are a hobbyist then you can certainly buy it but don’t expect a ROI.
Whenever you have ANY doubt and trust me any doubt just ask and someone from our great community will respond to help you make a better decision.
Just to make clear: Storj is not mining. It depends on real usage of the storage capacity that the node operators offer.
Currently usage is low. That means everybodys disks fill up very very slow.
You can read about some metrics here:
From my experience so far you can calculate with about 3-4 USD per filled TB per month.
Thank you:
Looks like I am online
Status ONLINE
Uptime 15m18s
Available Used Egress Ingress
Bandwidth N/A 19.09 MB 0 B 19.09 MB (since Apr 1)
Disk 4.50 TB 19.10 MB
I am thinking about running zkSync to reduce fees. Any advice? I need to read more about this.
To provide some idea of the possible income you may see. I’ve been offering 10TB of possible storage for about 10 months, of which 4.32TB has been used. The growth over the last few months has been at best 0.1TB so it has been very static.
This generates about $10 per month, so even if all 10TB was to be used I would still not be receiving the $30 per month you are looking for.
The system is a Pi 4 with an external 12TB WD Black drive. This is a good drive to use as the disk drive is an HC520, which is a 7200rpm enterprise grade drive with CMR recording.
It is possible if you have access to multiple ips and joined at least a year ago to accumulate enough data on your nodes. Starting now will be a lot slower.
Yes, absolutely. And yes, the WD Red Plus you linked is a good pick.
That is possible if your SMR does not die until then. My 8TB SMR drive died off pretty quickly under the constant strain (and that one was marketed as an enterprise grade HDD)
Starting a second node now would actually cut the load on your SMR drive in half and probably solve the problems it would otherwise run into. So I would suggest adding it right away if you’re planning to do it eventually anyway.
As for profitability have a look at this estimator: Realistic earnings estimator
In order to fill in your own numbers, please first copy it to your own google account.
Having about 8-16TB total on a single IP is reasonable, but you should know it will take 2-5 years to fill up depending on what size you go with. You can see all this in the estimator I just linked.
Nobody is currently making $100 a month on a single IP. This isn’t really possible. If you always had nodes only and with free space, you have about 18TB stored and you’re making about $60-70 a month right now. I know, because I’ve had nodes under pretty ideal conditions from the start and we’ve done lots of comparisons in the past to determine that those nodes collect data at equal rates. I also know this because the balance between incoming data and deletes is such that your node will currently lose more data than it gets if it has above 20TB stored. And that $100 income would be above the theoretical max because of that.
That doesn’t mean there haven’t been more profitable months. In the past we’ve had up to 500% surge payouts and extensive download testing which led to months with several hundreds of dollars of income. Don’t count on those… they may never happen again and even if they do, it will be rare and probably not at the same scale.
It also doesn’t mean network behavior will stay like it is. I adjust the sheet I linked frequently to keep it representative of recent and long term network behavior. But it fluctuates. It may get better, but it could also get worse. So keep that in mind and don’t overinvest.
Uptime can have a big impact. If a node is down for a while repair will kick in for some of its pieces as well as missed incoming data of course.
To a lesser extent speed of connection and HDDs can also have an impact. I you can’t finish transfers fast enough a node might be part of the long tail cancellation and end up not getting to keep the data. I’m guessing some of this might apply to @rit .
I think the location is going to make a difference and I’m based in the UK. The quality of our links may also have a major impact I’m on a 350/30 contended consumer-grade link from the only cable provider in the UK, so while my node has near-perfect uptime I can not say much about the link other than it has not caused any visible issues in the suspension & audit % scores.
The 350/30 aspect of my connection as BrightSilence notes put me at risk from long-tail cancellations compared to nodes with higher outgoing speeds such as yours.
It may be that comparing our stats is the first indication that many of the current node operators are going to see little future growth as more nodes get connected via high-speed symmetrical links. This in turn will raise some possible issues if the platform becomes focused on a small number of fast nodes.
I’m UK based too. Link quality probably has more of an impact than many people realise.
Faster nodes with better connection will win the upload and download races more often. There is however still a decent ‘spread’ built into the system, so node sizes seems to peak between 15-20TB currently. This leaves a lot of room for nodes with not the best quality internet to still earn, even if the amount from download wins is less.