This may have been answered elsewhere, currently I’m sharing 4 TiB which is all in use. I’ve thought about purchasing more, but is there a point if the reward does not increase? The reward estimator says not.
while we are mostly getting test data, then the longer you store the data the more likely to odds are that it will become egress… this would also to some extend hold true for real data… tho not 100% like test data… with test data storj wants to reward reliable long term SNO’s and thus the older the node is the better it will start to profit…
atleast to a degree…
when i think about running a 4tb node, i think that if i ran like say a 100tb node/nodes then my time spent on maintaining them would be better rewarded, because i will learn the process, learn to optimize my setups, buy disks in bulk (thus getting discounts) using the same pc hardware to run the drives… thus my electricity costs for controlling hardware for the drives haven’t really changed much… also the larger tb pr drive the less wattage used pr tb stored.
so even if older nodes didn’t make more money, then that the process itself becomes easier, and that there is more payout from a bigger setup means you time spent on setting up and maintaining the system is rewarded better.
We can hope for 10% egress of the stored data. So adding an additional 4TiB will hopefully get you 0.4TiB of additional egress (at least once that node is full, which can take 2-3 month depending on test traffic). Of course you get paid 1.5$ per 1TB of data stored per month.
So purchasing a new HDD might not return your investment within a year. The reward estimator is inaccurate and shouldn’t be used for investment considerations.
Am I the only one running these nodes not because of investment but because it’s cool and it’s a good use of resources I have unused anyway? 
Gonna be honest, I’d probably run a node even if I didn’t get any money for it, although I can perfectly well understand why Tardigrade would struggle with node churn. The money is a welcome bonus, as far as I’m concerned 
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I started with hardware I had (or wanted to buy anyways) and only recently invested in a 8TB drive but I did it from the money that storj had already paid me 
Since my homeserver would be running anyway, the electricity cost of an additional HDD is not relevent in my case.
Bearing in mind that my income seems to be still less than a dollar, the concept of being able to buy an HDD with Storj money seems SOOOOOO far away!
I also get the impression that big data centres are starting to “cotton on” to this, so I suspect us home node operators are really going to be left out.
It’s SO hard not to buy a new Ryzen server with SSDs to run this thing!
Still, the concept it hella fun
It takes some time and my nodes have been running for more than a year.
Datacenters have not much impact because they are typically behind only a few /24 subnetworks and therefore big parts of a datacenter could share the traffic of a single node.
SSDs would be really unprofitable
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It’s just wrong. If you share double the size you make about double the money. You obviously make twice as much based on storage usage alone and downloads scale quite linearly on average as well. At the current rate it seems likely you will fill up more space as well.
My nodes have about 12.6TB in use right now and are still growing rapidly. I personally was able to buy my HDD expansion from my Storj income, so it’s definitely worth it that way.
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Well, yes.
But I don’t run it for the profit
More importantly, I’m not sure that SSDs would improve things that much. The consensus from reading the boards is that the latency on the network is the biggest thing.
Maybe I should give it a try with a “before and after” experiment?
I can tell you the outcome your either going to waste money on an expensive SSD then it failing from all the stress because its not designed for it, You need enterprise SSDs that are built to withstand constant abuse.
Well, I was thinking of an 860 Pro. Rated for 4500TB, if memory serves, surely that should last quite a while?
Sure for a consumer product over 5 years, Not for writing deleting reading 24/7. It will for sure fail before it ever gets to the rated amount. For the cost of a 860 pro isnt worth to put it though that over a mechanical hard drive. SSDs are great for loading stuff fast games windows etc, Enterprise SSDs are build for running raids for NAS servers there made and built for constant read and writes. Your talking a huge price difference between the two 860 pro is about 200 bucks an enterprise SSD is about 1000+ $$$
Well, maybe an Ironwolf SSD
They cost a mint, but might be a fun little experiment.
Aaanyway, I’m aware that I’ve veered way off topic. I’ll shut up now
If you got money to blow and dont care go for it. But its not going to be worth it even if your not caring about profits. Just words of advice.
Thanks!
I’ll park the idea for the time being but will share my experience if I ever actually get to do it.
at present download to upload ratio it’s not like even a consumer ssd would wear out… atleast any time soon… sure enterprise is next level of endurance, and assurance that it will last…
but really… aren’t they chips… so essentially shouldn’t ssd’s wear out more depending on which technology they are… granted there might be a bit more to it than that… i duno… just thinking out loud lol
else old enterprise drives are like 100-150$ pr tb which is always an option… tho those will have really high latency compared to the modern version…