The part that’s somewhat offensive is the implication that serious or professional SNOs would agree with you, and that those of us who disagree are “lesser” or “just amateur” SNOs. This is both a bit rude and is a combination of multiple logical fallacies (ad hominem, appeal to authority, no true scotsman).
Many SNOs have worked through this thought experiment and the general consensus (though it’s not unanimous – there are some who disagree) is that unless your drives are failing on average more than once per year, running a single node per HDD will result in more revenue in the long term because the extra income provided by the additional nodes will be greater than the income lost when an HDD fails and a node needs to restart from scratch with a new HDD. If your drives are failing more often than once per year then you’re probably just going to lose money buying new HDDs anyway (with the exception of warranties that you may be able to claim).
I am currently operating multiple nodes whose capacity sums to almost 11TB and will likely be bringing a few more nodes online in the next few months.
My strategy when I have two disks of the same size is to run a node on a RAID1 using both disks. When the node is nearly full, I remove one of the drives from the mirror, reduce the number of RAID devices to 1 (it’s no longer a mirror) and start a new node on the second drive. This gives me redundancy while the second drive would be unused anyway so if one drive fails early then I can absorb that without losing the node. However, once that node fills up then it becomes more profitable to start a new node on one of the drives and effectively double the income potential.
There is definitely an argument to be made for using RAID5/6 to operate very large nodes simply because it eases management tasks. You aren’t having to deal with setting up new identities and you only have one node to monitor. Note that this is a decision unrelated to node revenue, but perhaps you decide that it’s worth it to earn a little less revenue if it makes the node easier to operate. That is definitely a fair position and I wouldn’t argue with it.
Here’s how I put it: using RAID levels with redundancy is an insurance policy against a drive failure. When a drive fails, the policy “pays out” as you don’t lose any revenue. However, every insurance policy has a premium – a price to be paid for that policy. In the case of Storj, you pay the price of lower income potential for the benefit of a disk failure not lowering your node’s revenue. You give up some revenue to stabilize your revenue stream.
In the short term, an insurance policy can pay off. If I get a new homeowner’s insurance policy and my house accidentally burns down next month then I will have made substantially more money as the policy payout will be far greater than any premiums I’ve paid so far. However, in the long run, most people can expect to lose money paying insurance premiums. We’ve just decided that it’s worth the extra security to pay some money in exchange for eliminating the risk of catastrophic loss.
That’s exactly what happens when you run a Storj node on a storage layer with redundancy. The insurance policy can “pay off” if you have a bunch of drive failures shortly after launching the node – but the odds are that, in the long term, you’ll make more money simply by not having the policy and running a node per HDD.
