I didn’t use to consider energy costs much, but with prices skyrocketing I now have to consider that running the HDD alone will cost me about 3 EUR a month. That starts to dig into earnings a little. And for that reason I’m currently buying the biggest HDD’s possible when I expand.
I recently bought a 20TB HDD for about 400 EUR. Knowing it would take about 2 years to earn that back taking energy costs into account. It wouldn’t surprise you to hear I use my own earnings calculator to determine that. Of course should payouts drop, this HDD purchase could become iffy. 2 years is already quite a long time.
Personally I have one other consideration that many others don’t have the luxury to do yet. I want to always cover costs of expansion with previous Storj earnings. So if I haven’t made enough money since purchasing my previous expansion, I would probably not buy a new HDD to expand. Now I’ve been around since 2019 and profited from both high surge payouts and testing traffic as well as being able to sell high. So this is currently not my biggest concern. But I think this is where surge payout could help people justify paying for a long term investment with surge payouts.
As for the impact of vetting and held amount. Vetting on the customer facing satellites took about 6 weeks to 2 months on relatively new nodes I launches near the beginning of this year. That has an impact, but on a 2 year timeframe, that really isn’t that important. Held amount is fairly similar and maybe even less impactful. It would only add up to about $26 total and then you get half back in month 16. If neither of these systems existed at all (which is probably not a good idea) it would at most reduce that ROI period by 2-3 months.
However, I’m in the luxury position that I run my nodes on hardware that would have already been online anyway. I only have to consider energy costs of additional HDD’s I run. This is not the case for many node operators who have to take running costs of the additional hardware into account too.