I have a history of using cooperative storage systems (or partly cooperative) with the first having been Symform about 8 years ago. Much of what has been published about storj indicates a lot of thought has gone into its design (something that Symform lacked) but the online estimator has a major issue that should be addressed. Currently, it indicates that I could earn $770pa by providing 0TB of storage at 200/35 Mbps with 100% available bandwidth. Providing 1TB of storage only increased the earnings to $781pa.
As you can see the estimator’s math(s) is basically broken meaning that it is rather hard to rate the rest of the project. The most over the top example given is seen by setting bandwidth to 200/200 Mbps, while offering zero storage for which it estimates over $4,400pa.
As for why I care - firstly because I wish a project like this to succeed and secondly because I would use the expected income to partly cover the cost of upgrading my internet link and for personal storage costs. At the moment it is clear that the estimator’s numbers are meaningless.
We are aware of some of the estimator issues and we are actively working on improving the experience. At the time, it’s hard to estimate it accurately because there is not much customer data on the network. Keep that in mind while you use it for now.
While setting up my node, I checked out the online earnings calculator. After several minutes adjusting the sliders, it became apparent that the premium earnings are based on available bandwidth rather than storage.
There was hardly any difference between 3TB and 5TB. However, there was a very large difference between 5 TB and 15 TB bandwidth. If one is running a single node, the available bandwidth is larger than if one is running multiple nodes through a single IP pipe… due to the traffic overhead. Furthermore, each node on the same IP is competing for the same offered data.
So, I’m not convinced… yet… that running multiple nodes on one IP using multiple drives distributed one per node is going to yield a larger payout than running a single node configured in RAID 5 using three decently sized drives. The RAID array will ensure that you don’t lose data. And if you have a small UPS unit, you don’t need to worry about minor electrical outages. So… you can swap drives as they die and maintain one good node in near perfect working order… Perhaps maximizing your bandwidth usage which is the premium payment.
The online earnings calculator is pretty flawed. In your example of holding 3TB vs 5TB of data, it’s fairly reasonable to conclude that if you hold 66% more data, you’re likely also seeing 66% more egress traffic on average. After all assuming the chance of download of each piece is about average, holding more pieces would simply lead to more downloads taking place. (You should probably also not use the current test traffic as a representative pattern of downloads in the future)
Each transfer is already handled in a separate thread by the node, so it’s always dealing with separate simultaneous transfers, there is no additional network overhead for spreading that same amount of traffic across multiple nodes. There may be a slight increase in CPU use and RAM, but I think most systems can deal with that perfectly fine. And either way the theoretical tiny bit of overhead it would add is no way going to make up for the 33% loss of revenue for sacrificing an entire disk.
That’s fine, I’m not here to convince you. Just sharing my point of view based on what I know, you’re free to make your own decisions.
