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.