Just discovered this topic 
https://forum.storj.io/t/use-an-existing-online-hardware-vs-investments-roi-expectation/23575
Oh, I’m sooo greedy for my $14.00 a month!
Yes, to some extent it is a “get out of jail free” card for Storj because they can always say they advised not to invest anything. But, you are correct. The network would not have grown to the scale it has without some people investing in hardware for it.
What is misunderstood by many people is that Storj doesn’t target the Average Joe to become a SNO. They target people who have larger home servers for whatever reason or run businesses where they also manage their own hardware. In this cases it makes sense to have a larger amount of unused hardware. The marketing team framed it include everyone, but in reality the pricing already excludes John Doe with his only 500GB HDD that he had lying around in a closet for a couple of years.
today we see over supply, that’s why Storj can afford lower payouts to nodes. All regulated by demanding and supply. There is some hobbyist that can tell that something is done for best of all and they dont care about payouts, but most of people dont what is best for storj they here to make money and Vis versa Storj don’t care about people, they here to make money. In some point it all going to balance that we all here to make money. But in market all decide Supply and demand, not just some people that decided that he want X$ for TB. As we see today even after payout lowering, amount of nodes growing and amount of free storage growing every day, even if we see on stat that used amount is growing to.
Storj was always either going to have to raise charges or lower payments. They were making a loss after all - and they remain a company that hopes to one day make a profit.
I’m certainly NOT in the position I think it is ok to rent out my storage for free - and this is why I’ve never brought up a test node. I genuinely think it is unfair of Storj (particularly given the reduced payout rates ) to ask for access to those resources for free.
But even you can see the geography of where those nodes are located has changed since the pricing changes. The US has become far less significant compared to what it was. Russia is still growing strongly. Australia, well that never got off the ground to start with. lol (If Storj does want Australian nodes you are going to have to pay a surcharge there as Australian electricity prices won’t allow otherwise.)
One question I would have for you Vadim was, if you were facing the current prices paid by Storj 18 months ago would you have continued to invest hardware in the network given the current status with supply, demand and projected income?
Why is it unfair to ask? They are not forcing any one. Everyone can decide for themselves if they want to spend their ressources for free or not. It doesn’t hurt to ask.
So what? We hear this over and over again.
“We can’t produce enough tomatoes if we don’t buy a fully automated 2000$ watering system for my small garden”
Guess what, the consumer does not care what your costs are. You can either compete or you can’t.
How does that change the economics? It does not!
I mean, you were. I don’t remember the exact numbers, but is was something like this:
We have customers paying 5$ per TB, while paying 2,5 nodes 20$ per TB.
For egress we had customers paying 7$ per TB, while paying 10$ to nodes, and probably the same amount again for S3 egress. Plus all the overhead costs.
I mean, how did anyone expect that to work in the long run? It doesn’t. It works as long as there is VC money, after that it has to come from customers.
That is why there has be a price cut and why it won’t be the last one.
I don’t know why the crypto space is so full of fanatical people.
It is not that hard. Even a child should be able understand that math.
i just got 20TB hdd, moved there one of the node, and all free space filed for Chia.
And storj payd for this HDD. And chia will give me additional income in future, when next boom happens. today i have 280+ TB of storj and 125 TB of chia. That’s how I use resources in full potential from day 1.
Also I have little bit other prices for HDD than usual people.
Because I think there is something fundamentally wrong in trying to make a buck off someone else’s back that you aren’t willing to compensate them for.
Of course others are welcome to make a different determination. They have that choice. I’ve simply made mine. People are free to take a contrary view.
I’ve been fully conscious of Storj’s need to either change charges or reduce payments for a significant period of time. I even said that the revised payment for egress was higher than I expected. So, no. I was never greedy regards Storj .My issues with them have been more around their management. Like the business speech they use in presentations and sometimes their use of weasel words. Things like their pushing of zksync before they could even accept it as a payment solution themselves drove me nuts. lol I’ve always been a minor player here and I don’t think my monthly payments ever exceeded $25 at their highest. At current rates it will be at least 6 months before i get back there. But that’s fine. I’m ok where things are for now and I do think it likely pricing will again change in the future. (with egress rates likely lowered)
So, no. I have never expected prior payment levels to remain.
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It’s OK if the payouts per TB go down as long as traffic goes up. I am more interested in how much I get per month, not per TB.
However, lately the payments went down and traffic/used space went down as well.
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I didn’t have still, started in 2017. No one enterprise disk, all from NAS series, except one for desktop. But I never used RAID any kind, so I believe that using disks in RAID wearing them much much faster, than using as single disks. It also perhaps related to COW filesystems, which makes more read-write operations than fs like ext4 or NTFS.
I have lost only one HDD with its external box together (this crappy box burned down my HDD when died), but it did not host any Storj node, only the torrent one and my archives.
At least several cases:
- home media servers;
- Smart Home management servers;
- NASes;
- mining rigs;
- game servers;
- home virtual lab servers;
- home web servers;
- old not used laptops;
- raspberry Pi-like low power devices (they also can be part of Smart Home or small web-server);
- unused but already paid VPSes;
etc.
You may imagine a lot of cases actually. Some SNOs are managed to buy a hardware from earnings from hosting a node(s) on existing online hardware and extend.
HDD death is generally just about how many drive years you go through.
i’m running 36 HDD’s and when i started i wasn’t buying new disks, thus far only had one new disk die out of 26, or so…
also running 48 HDD’s tho not all for Storj… so i go through a fair amount of drive years, just one year would compare to half a century of a single HDD user.
So its not really a surprise most people don’t see it… HDD are very random and often vibration related.
thats one recommendation i would make for people… make sure your new disks have vibration sensors and avoid exposing disks to vibration, most of my disks that died i think went due to shocks.
I don’t disagree that the system hardware can be used for other tasks, since Storage Nodes are in generally pretty low workloads.
what i question is how easy and useful it often is to use a disk that is being used for Storj.
but i don’t represent the avg SNO, since i use SSD accelerated ZFS RAIDZ1.
tho i’m sure we all are aware of how often people complain about high iowait on their drives.
i don’t really see the system hardware as relevant to the node… only really the HDD, since the HDD is the major costs … the system is less than 10% of the cost.