My node is 20.88TB, that’s probably the maximum you can get now. Last month I got paid $32. The space usage was pretty much flat the last two months, assuming this continues, I am looking at $384/year. Now, I already know how to run the node etc, so it does not take that much time to monitor it (and it’s a good thing that I have one big node instead of lots of small ones).
Someone setting up a brand new node will likely not see any money in the first year (little usage and the held percentage). At least for me there is a limit if minimum earnings below which it is not worth spending the time. For example, I would not run an ASIC miner if it made 2EUR/month over the cost of electricity, because even that “profit” would just be eaten by exchange and transfer fees.
Pretty much the only reason I keep running my node now is the hope if Storj somehow taking off and the traffic going up by a lot. And, you know, I already have the drives etc.
“Using only what you have online anyway” sounds great, but doesn’t work for most people, since the requirement is:
- A lot of empty space (at least if you want to earn anything above the transfer/exchange fees)
- No plans whatsoever to use that space for anything else (no way to shrink a node).
So, basically, it only works for people who bought 10TB hard drives for their file server instead of 1TB by mistake.
@IsThisOn
To save you some trouble, here are the disk space statistics of my node for the last 2 years:
All satellites:
OK, the no longer active europe-north-1 is distorting the graph, let’s remove it and us2:
So, about 7TB growth in 2 years, most of the growth being concentrated in a couple of months.
Here’s a non-stacked graph:
Taking shorter time periods, here’s the last 6 months:
And the last 3 months:
It’s flat or even shrinking.