So after doing some reading on here it seems having a big node is not necessarily as profitable as having a few smaller ones.
I have a tower server with 4tb but also have some pis and some 1tb usb drives so which setup am I better to use? I’m not in it for profit but if it could cover electricity costs that would be great.
Doesn’t matter. All nodes behind the same /24 subnet of public IPs are treated as one node for uploads and as a separate ones for audit and uptime checks.
Each new node must be vetted. While vetting the node can receive only 5% of potential traffic until got vetted. To be vetted on a one satellite, it should pass 100 audits for it. For the one node it should take at least a month.
For multiple nodes behind the same /24 subnet of public IPs the vetting can be longer in the same amount of times as a number of nodes.
So it’s better to start the next node only when a previous one almost full or at least vetted. In this case the vetting process will not take forever.