Not a good idea, but if you would connect them to an external power supply, it may work. Just note that USB is not supposed to be used for a long running load - the cheap USB controllers inside the cheap USB enclosures likely would overheat and shutdown from time to time.
This may be a not so bad, but do not use USB enclosures, it’s better to use an adapter, like a Geekworm’s one.
Some run even more than one disk per Pi4, depends on memory and CPU (you need to have a one core per node), more memory is always better, because it can be used for caching.
This is better than a previous one.
It may work, but you need to test. Likely 512MiB or RAM would be a show-stopper. You need to use a really light OS, and I suspect that it is arm 32 bit, so maybe wouldn’t work today.
This is unlikely would be a bottleneck - all nodes behind the same /24 subnet of public IPs are treated as a one big node. So all traffic for a one node will be distributed between all your nodes depending on their performance or otherwise equally.
But in general - we do not recommend to buy anything with purpose only for Storj - you may not have a ROI anytime soon, use only what you have now and what will be online with Storj or without. Only in this case any income is a pure profit.
I used to look at this Grafana dashboard, but I don’t understand something:
If US1 ingress increased around 3 times recently and went up from 24-26 PB/month to 70PB/month, why the used space is not changing.
Most of that 70PB is uploaded with very short TTL?
storj was generating artificial (but paid) test data to stress test the network. and BOY IT WAS A WILD TIME. Nodes failing and disks filling up left and right.
Now the tests have finished and the test data was deleted.
As for your sorta theory… I would look into using disks larger than 2TB. they won’t even pay for their own electricity if full. (again, unless your electricity is free). But 6TB or 8TB can generate a very modest profit per drive.
And then I wouldn’t use the USB enclosures, I would use something more robust that you can leave running 24/7 without interference or worrying about cables dropping out or cats eating it.
I have a server with 7 drives plugged into it and am running 7 docker containers (just fired off via one big docker compose file) it’s pretty easy.
The node software is pretty efficient nowadays. It’s not the hog that it used to be.
But I would also see if you can incubate multiple node instances, so that you can split them off to other boxes down the line (as long as you keep at least a 1:1 ratio of nodes to both hard drives and codes).
It’s not worth running Storj on 1-2TB HDDs, as they typically need to be holding at least 2TB of paid data to even be covering their own ongoing expenses (power/cooling/bandwidth/slots etc) month to month. Upgrade your NAS with the 12TBs, then install one Storj client into a corner of it… let it run and get past the 9-month withholding period… and fill one disk. You can re-evaluate if you want to give more resources to Storj in a year or so.
It is worth running… on larger HDDs… that you’re already keeping online for something else. Don’t spend a penny to run it on small drives, especially if they’d be external-usb.
Also it would be good to know if there are still deletions to expect from the previous trial accounts or that what we see in the charts are at least mostly fully paying customers.
And conversion rate trial → paid would be very interesting…
I didn’t think what you said could possibly be true. Then I actually looked at the charts… and yeah… I think December is going to start with the same TB-used as November did
Most of the new data these days seems to be short term backup stuff. That’s the new storj, a lot of traffic but little growth. Nothing we can do if customers using storj like this…
I mean that’s how I was thinking of using Storj. I have a few TB of data I want to backup offsite for a reasonable cost. AWS Glacier is comparable in price but has complex pricing and retrieval. Storj makes a lot of sense for this kind of tertiary backup (using the 3-2-1 strategy).
Being a node operator could offset some of the cost, is what I was thinking. I’ll probably use some of my drives in the already existing NAS boxes that have the extra SATA ports along with Docker.
Also one more thing I’m confused by: why does Storj need a crypto coin. Can you directly buy storage capacity with it? Why not just have a centralized database that keeps track of everything and one bank account that just pays USD?
Good question, my best guess is so they dont have to deal with world wide payments. This makes it pretty easy for them, they just pay with crypto, and then everyone else deals with converting it to fiat.
Yes, Storj accepts the token as a payment method for their storage services. You also get 10% additional credit if you top up your account with the token instead of using a card. The only downside is that, as far as I know, you are not able to withdraw any “leftover” credit if you choose to stop using their services.
You can of course. Your account is in USD. When you pay in tokens they are immediately converted to USD that are credited to the account. Once you close the account you can request a check for the remaining balance. It does not matter how that credit got created.
Any remaining STORJ balance (not including the bonus) at time of account deletion will be refunded on request in form of STORJ token, using the current USD/STORJ exchange rate at the exact time we send the refund.
Note that refunds will only be approved in case the account is being completely closed, as sending STORJ deposits to Storj Labs is for the sole purpose of paying account usage fees. This is not a crypto wallet where you can deposit and withdraw funds at random times.
