I have a proposition prepare a list of good (tested) hardware for SNOw and recommendations how to use it. Also we can prepare “black” list, with tested hardware (for example: do not use too old x86 one core CPU’s)
1 Like
That’s not a bad idea. I see on the other community tons of posts trying to get a Pi to work when really they aren’t cut out for this. Just too slow.
The rpi3 can work and it works for me. However, as you stated it’s slow and has not so much RAM.
But it can work and it’s power saver for most cases. When owners of powerful servers will account their bills for electricity, they probably would shutdown their equipment if it was running only for storagenode.
But the pi will survive 
3 Likes
I get that it can work, but moving forward will it be a good experience for SNO’s? I might be in the minority here but I want a “plug -n- play” level of solution. I run my V3 node from a Synology NAS and it appears to be kicking butt. Docker isn’t difficult as long as there are instructions, and once we get a native app for each platform this will be even easier.
Easier = more people doing it. Troubleshooting a Pi3’s inability to accept shards isn’t something I would want to do.
I would like this list as well. I’m new here and have read the storage node docs, but haven’t seen much information about what hardware is required.
I am using an SBC with a 6 core Rockchip RK3399 and 1G ram. I have a USB disk but now realize I should have connected via SATA (USB was cheaper). How bad is this? The drive is HDD and spins down after a while.
My intention of building a storage node was to subsidize the cost of using the product for off-site storage of my personal files.
The requirements you can read here: Step 1. Understand Prerequisites - Storj Docs
That’s could be a problem - your node will lose the race with other competitors for the pieces:
1 Like
I don’t think it’ll get the chance to spin down very often unless it’s super quiet on the network.
Btw, USB disks are usually just an internal SATA HDDs in a USB enclosure. You can probably just take it apart and connect it to SATA. Though you might void your warranty doing that.
I read that list, and I meet or exceed minimum requirements, but is there a list of what is optimal? Should I have SSD or will HDD do.
I have two SSD’s that are 512G (and some of that used for other stuff) and I’m considering putting mergerfs on top to leverage the space on both of them for Storj.
I installed hd-idle to helpfully mitigate the spin down on the HDD.
I can cite myself
So, if you meet requirements - you should be fine.
1 Like
The requirements are extraordinarily minimal. A list would include nearly every linux-capable computer made today :). I can say that I’m running a storagenode on a 1GB Ram Pine64 (esentially a medium-grade cell phone cpu) and its running fine using about 300MB of ram.
4 Likes
I’d say don’t set up anything specifically for Storj, unless it’s a raspberry pi or other low power arm device. My raspberry pi 4 gets great success percentages (always higher than 98%). With the current surge pricing I even receive enough money to make it profitable to buy new hardware (I’d earn it back in 1-2 months!). A raspberry pi 4 with a high capacity (8TB+) USB hard disk is great value.
If you don’t want to spend the time trying to figure out how to disable spin down properly, you could just make a cron job that writes a single character to a text file every minute.
What is your concurrent uploads set at for a Pi 4?
It’s not used anymore, so better to comment out this setting and restart the node
As STORJ uses AES-256 encryption isn’t it better to use any CPU with instruction set that supports this algorithm?
Wouldn’t using a CPU without hardware AES encryption in a STORJ node lose in performance to a more modern CPU?