I believe you should use the “latest” tag now.
Yes. Not necessarily as much as the number of nodes, but still (e.g. 3 vetting nodes won’t take 3 times as much time as a single vetting node).
The post explains that the more available data storage you have, the longer it will take to fill up a node in a non-linear fashion. You should copy the “more realistic earnings estimator” linked in the post you cited to your google account to fill in your numbers and see for yourself.
Having 5x8TB or 2x20TB or even 1x40TB won’t change a thing to this regards, as long as they all are within the same /24 subnet (and even more so behind the same IP) because they are all going to treated as a “big single node” for ingress.
(This doesn’t apply to egress which only depends on the quantity of data you’re storing)
This said, having several nodes scattered among several HDD is always a better option as it mitigates the risks of losing nodes if some HDDs fail, whereas having only one huge HDD could make you lose everything if it were to fail.
Vetting progress is not shown on the web dashboard.
One needs to run some technical commands to uncover them.
See this for instance:
As of today, 100TB would never ever be filled up even after 20 years.
The best approach is to start one first node with say an 8TB disk, and wait for this node to be nearly full.
In the mean time, you may want to start another small node (500GB) so it gets vetted and is ready for the future.
Then, when your main node is nearly full, start a new one with another 8TB disk (or expand your small 500GB which would now be fully vetted and ready - and start another new one for “incubation”).
And so on. By doing so, and if usage of the Tardigrade network stays roughly as it has been for the past months, it would already take around 7 to 8 years to fill up 48TB (6x8TB).
It would also be better from an electricity cost point of view.