Maybe your hardware draws too much power?
With respect, if Alexeyâs reply isnât making sense then it seems youâve not properly research the project before spinning up a node.
There are ample posts about that very subject.
Best wishes
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Setting up PCâs to run drives is often one problem for new node operators. The electric burn is too high. Some people use NAS devices they already have running 24/7 and share out their extra capacity.
Using a Raspberry Pi or similar device will give you a much lower electrical cost versus a standard PC or hardware server.
Lastly, data growth around here is often driven by the usage of customers and when large customers add significant data, we all see substantial data growth. When this isnât happening, data growth can be tepid due to all of the nodes out there splitting the data between them.
With all things like this, the nodes that have the least expenses are going to be the most profitable and experience the most growth. Those who canât make money will simply not participate unless they just enjoy the technology and donât mind paying for the losses.
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There may be âample posts about that very subjectâ somewhere, but I had not SEEN them and itâs NOT made clear to a person new to the concept of Storj that you are relying on VOLUNTEERS to donate their hardware and electric to make your COMMERCIAL project a success.
Your entire basic business model is flawed - youâre not a âvolunteerâ project like Folding@Home
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The DRIVES ALONE are the majority of the power draw, and youâre NOT going to reduce that without causing âslow to respondâ issues - and even THEN not by much overall.
So, what drives are you using?
Correct, they arenât. Thatâs why they pay you. Theyâre just not responsible for any additional costs you incur. Plenty of nodes are profitable. Mine are, because I have no additional costs other than ones I made using profits already made with Storj. You may like to pretend itâs impossible, but it isnât. Iâm pretty sure your energy bill would be lower than mine if you have a low rate for US standards, because the Netherlands isnât exactly cheap. Use existing hardware that is already online and you have effectively 0 costs. Do with the info what you like, but lets not pretend itâs not possible to make money or this is a volunteer type of deal.
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So you made a mistake and are dissapointed about it, because your expectations are not met?
We can clarify some things and help you maybe, if you like the technology, and share information with us, how it came to your dissapointment.
Best wishes
Dude. Itâs very simple.
Without storj: you run the server, pay for maintenance, electricity, and waste extra space.
With storj: you share this unused space with storj and get paid something non-zero, every month. Without having any other extra costs after 15 min time investment for initial setup.
Non-zero is infinitely larger than zero. Itâs free money for doing nothing. What are you complaining about?!
Pleas read official documentation before jumping to conclusions.
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Without storj, the server would be doing NOTHING, not turned on, perhaps not even assembled - or it would be working with something like Signum or Chia and earning money that way.
Donât bother replying to me, this has become TOTALLY obvious over the last week that this company is NOT interested in actually turning into a real project rather than a âhobbyâ project with very limited ability to ever grow - and has zero interest in paying most folks even enough to cover the electric costs of just running their Hard Drives in many cases.
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Why do you ASSUME I am angry?
Unhappy, sure, but why ASSUME âangryâ?
Disappointed that this project isnât worth the time I invested in my research, sure - but angry does NOT describe my attitude towards Storj.
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BTW - I didnât âmake a mistakeâ.
No, my hopes and expectations were not met or even close - but I have other options Iâm also exploring, at least one of which looks like a much better option for my aims.
Iâm not here to learn about the technology, after way over a decade as a computer tech and more time as a network tech.
And Iâve ALREADY shared âhow it came to my disappointmentâ.
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Then you donât have unused resources online and this project is not for you. Iâm not sure why is not clear.
Just think about it. If it was profitable to build and maintain datacenters from scratch â storj would have done it themselves, they wonât need middlemen. Backblaze does it and they are yet to turn a profit.
Of course you did. You expect storj to pay for hardware, maintenance, profit for you, profit for them, and take your kids through college. This expectation is not rooted in reality.
Unless you make an effort to try and understand the purpose of this project, you will continue to be confused and frustrated.
You need to adjust this mindset. There are things you donât know and there is a lot for you to learn. You are barely scratching the surface.
Good example:
So you think we are all here wrong and you are the only one who sees the truth from one glance. Or is it more likely that itâs you who have misunderstood something, and thousands of people who run nodes are onto something?
Hope you can re-evaluate your approach to learning, discovery, exploration, and general self doubt and open mindedness â and good luck.
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To be fair, we got paid rather big piles of tokens in the past and at least I got even more by HODLing the tokens for a while.
For a new operator, the usage and payouts are tiny, but the time needed to set everything up and monitor it does not scale down. Itâs very similar for a 100GB node and a 10TB node.
Yeah, we got a head start for sure. But you can still make money. Itâs just not going to be much in the first year. As long as you at the least use existing hardware and low power devices or already powered on devices, you can afford an upgrade after the second year. Weâve also been around for almost 5 years to get where we are now. Itâs still very much possible to get to a similar point in a similar amount of time. If you look at a 5 year time frame, a single subnet with sufficient space would make around $1600 over that time and have about 30TB stored. Subtract the cost of HDDâs and you still have $1000 and space to spare. Using about 8w per hdd, for 2 hddâs thatâs 0.008 kw * 2 hddâs * 24 hours * 365 days * 5 years = 700.8kw. At a low US rate of $0.15 per kwh, youâd pay about $105 for that. Leaving almost $900 profit. But even better, at that time youâre making around $50 a month, HDDâs would be cheaper and you donât even need 2 of them for that whole period.
None of the high earners now got it handed to them. We all had to spend time to make money. This is not a short term get rich quick scheme. But it is profitable, even if you include cost of HDDâs and energy. Definitely if you follow the advise of only using what you already have AND have online.
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Ha, maybe if they use your overoptimistic ârealistic earnings calculatorâ 
No but seriously, this will not be the last price cut and customer data has mostly be stagnant in the last few months. Itâs difficult to make Predictions, especially about the future! 
No way you can give a respectable outlook for the next 5y. I will soon spin up a Docker for STORJ, to compare your calculator with actual numbers.
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Iâve always been very open to substantiated corrections. Please let me know which of the values in the table on the right you think are incorrect on the associated topic and provide some evidence from your nodes as to why the values are incorrect. But this is not the topic for that.
Here I am going to agree with you. The future is unpredictable at the least. Then again, HDD costs also go down. This however is why Iâve never spend a cent on new hardware that I hadnât already earned with Storj. Iâm pretty risk averse and was never willing to be in the negative to run my nodes. So yeah, grain of salt or more with all predictions.
That I very much appreciate. It would be helpful if you could track vetting as well as that process has significantly changed since I last did the same thing. But just FYI, I have been doing this and have more nodes than I would otherwise have just to keep track of node behavior and differences between nodes of different ages. Thatâs where many of the value adjustments and logic adjustments over the past years have come from. Anyway, the place to post about that is here: Realistic earnings estimator
I welcome any and all feedback, but I do require some actual data in order to make changes. Thanks if you want to help out though!
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My node is 20.88TB, thatâs 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 itâs 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 âprofitâ 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.
âUsing only what you have online anywayâ sounds great, but doesnât 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, letâs remove it and us2:
So, about 7TB growth in 2 years, most of the growth being concentrated in a couple of months.
Hereâs a non-stacked graph:
Taking shorter time periods, hereâs the last 6 months:
And the last 3 months:
Itâs flat or even shrinking.
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And that is perfectly fine. Those people should just accept the reality and find something else that is suited for them, instead of complaining that it is not for them.
Quoting myself:
If it is eaten, fine, but otherwise a profit is a profit doesnât matter how small.
If monitoring it, exchanging the crypto coins for Euros etc takes one hour per month, and you get 2EUR/month of âreal profitâ, that means you are working for 2EUR/h or way below minimum wage in a lot of countries.
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