Hi everyone,
I’m considering to setup a third node since i have some spare disks. I was thinking to use a mini pc (minimum i5 + 8gb) connected via usb3 to a 5 bay hard disk enclosure. Any thoughts on this setup?
Thanks for your feedback.
Cheers,
Tiago
I have a mini-pc 8gbram 2ghz 4core with ssd and usb for databases, struggling with 8 of 10 tb node data.
can not recommend to buy anything.
how big are the drives and what type, and why not puting them on the other running devices?
Will your third node be on a separate /24 IP from your other two? If so, the answer is yes! Better than having those disks online and empty.
Any other uses in mind for the mini-PC?
I actually have a N100 / 16GB with 8 nodes (databases all on the main SSD, which is RAID1 mirrored BTRFS), Syncthing and VPN; which is running real fine. Actually RAM is of more use than is a better processor.
The hard disk enclosure, is very convenient. Especially since they usually have their own power supply. 5Gbps (USB 3.0) boils down to a theoretical maximum transfer rate of 600MB/s, which is enough for 5 drives I would say. I’m running my home NAS already for years, quite stable this way.
Buy or not to buy, especially is a consideration in light of the fact whether you have other uses in mind, the actual cost of equipment, the size of the drives and the electricity costs in your area.
So, a mini-PC is about 20W and 5 drives about 35W. In my area, this would imply $20 electricity costs a month. Which means, I need to have at least 13TB of data to cover the long term costs. Which means it would render negative at least the first year (filling that 13TB), and probably starts to run profitable more than two years from now.
This equation is less worrisome, of your face other uses for that mini-PC anyway. Besides, you don’t have to start all drives at once (so cutting electricity costs).
I had very low iops using a 4-bay and 8-bay USB 3.1 external HDD case. I agree that the theoretical transfer speeds are more than enough and when transferring big files is also achieveable, but if you have a lot of very small files like with STORJ, SATA works much better for me than any USB-enclosure.
I doubt this, because the saturation in this case is just the 5-30MB/s you achieve at a maximum with the mixed IO on HDD (not SSD). This would even work with two drives at USB 2.0, although I wouldn’t recommend it. I can’t however see, in what respect USB 3.0 would be inferior to SATA in this case. It’s not a limitation of the BUS, but the HDD in this case.
It becomes another story, when you want to save your hard drive from failure and need the sequential speeds. Although, most hard disks still are below 150MB/s.
Yeah that seems to be everyones problem. Even with the reduced payouts people usually say having a full 8TB or larger is “worth it”. It’s just hard to wait for it to get filled (and deal with withheld payments those first 9 months). So many SNOs just give up…
That’s just because many don’t calculate the cost on beforehand and don’t seem to realize that it really should be a hobby, you need to have the same hardware running for other purposes (including professional ones) or you should take that advice not to buy a thing really serious. One of these three, no other options left.
Again with these unreliable USB connections… 
. All this forum posts didn’t teach you anything? You are not running a node for a year, you are running a node for at least 5 years.
The only stable and reliable connection for long term is the internal SATA/SAS, and maybe eSATA, if you can find enclosures with that. USB 1,2, … x will always fail sooner all later, or creates all sorts of delays, timeouts etc. And atop of your big HDD you need a SSD for cache/db-es?
Good Lord!
From my quick maths, 55W would equate to about 40kWh. You pay $0.50/kWh?? That’s eye-watering!
Welcome in Western-Europe.
Current price here is €0,40 equating US$ 0.44. And it will probably rise the coming year.
I’m actually paying a little less, because of long-term contract from before the rise of energy prices here.
Where in Western Europe?
My parents in Portugal are currently paying €0.08/kWh (will go up to €0.12 in January), are discrepancies that huge between countries??
Yes, it’s. This started to happen, because some countries closed the nuclear stations, and also now they do not have a cheap hydrocarbons anymore.
The green energy is to expensive still. The best solution would be to run a nuclear stations until thermo-nuclear stations would be invented.
It will be in a different country 
Cheers
Never had the experience, the most unreliable factor in the whole process turned always out to be me wanting to fine-tune or improve some code.
Besides, I have a DIY NAS which turns out to be much more reliable than my brother’s and my parents’ in law Symology and QNAP NAS-es.
And yeah, of course SAS/SATA/M.2/SCSI is more fixed, so your children won’t screw it up. And yeah, you have to mind the fact the drives are adequately powered. And yeah, the bandwidth of USB is lower than SAS, SATA600 and M.2. But in the remainder I don’t see many benefits of them, bit the price is much in favor of USB.
For the time being i think i will run only the Storj node. I already own the mini-pc and the hardisks, so i would only spend money buying the hard disk enclosure. If i go ahead, i will be spending an average of 9€ a month in electricity which i think it’s a reasonable value. Cheers.
Thanks for your input. I will definitely take that into consideration. Cheers.
Thanks for your input. Cheers.
Exactly my thoughts. I also see this as a hobby! I have the hardware laying around, i have the bandwidth and the electricity costs aren’t really an issue so why not run a node 
Cheers
For sure there are, but mainly driven by taxes.
The bald price can be found here: Price data — HEPI
As you see Portugal has an average price of €0,22. So taxes must be negative, if it’s like you say it is.