Confirmed. Thank you very much.
And sorry for my late response. I guess I got side tracked a bit too much today. I will have to reduce that tomorrow.
Yes, this should work too, and as suggested
should work as well
ok thx.
Okay, then this works.
command:
# - --contact.self-signed-tags="storage_price=1.5,egress_price=2,repair_price=2,audit_price=2" #100% Payout
- --contact.self-signed-tags="storage_price=0.75,egress_price=1,repair_price=1,audit_price=1" #50% Payout
Can you post a link?
I’d be interested as well. The used market doesn’t seem nearly as attractive in Europe as it is in the US…
True. I mostly decided to buy new drives for that reason in the past. Later it was recertified and some used parts from poland. Now it’s all over, even RMA doesn’t work.
Then we need to get rid of the 24 rule, if SNOs are using multiple IPs in the same location it defeats the purpose, not saying you are just it bypasses the 24 rule.
It’s unusual to me all my nodes are under the same IP because they are on the same location like it is requested and encourage by the devs, and I struggle getting past 9TB.
I know you deleted it, its fine, but increasing the storage was encourage, IMO at the bare minimum maintaining the storage should be encourage, SNOs payout can’t just be for power alone, at bare minimum now that things are tight for storj, maintenance has to come into play,
At Amazon, the place I can get drives unfortunately, a 24TB renewed drive is 760€
non SMR drives are expensive, the only thing a bit less expensive is SMR external drives I have to break in, 12TB SMR is around 400€, 20TB around 600€.
If a drive fails and I need to replace it is going to take a lot time to recuperate the investment. 760€ for a 24TB drive half full is around what $15 to $20 a month? Thats 4 years minimum for that drive alone and it would probably take a year or two to get half full. so we are looking at 6-7 years operating a drive to just get it’s moneys worth for storj, nothing else.
If I could fill 24TB and it cost 300 or 400 less it would be a different story, but this is not the case today for anyone.
I just want to highlight that you are making claims for the entire network now…
I already shared my HDD vendor with you. 25€ per TB for recertified drives. Someone mentioned used ultrastars for less than 15€ per TB. I looked that one up and found a few used drives in the 10-15€ per TB range. Not the best smart values. I still need to do some homework on that part to understand which drives to pick and which drives to avoid. My plan is to give claude that task. It should be able to just crawl through the listings, extract the screenshot with the smart values and flag down the good HDDs for me. Sounds like a fun task.
I am pretty sure that was in the US.
25€ is good, but I still have to pay for shipping.
and till no matter what drive I get it still need to get filled it still needs to pay for itself, it still is a approximately a 6 year commitment if the network fills it up to half, you cant escape that, and I do not live in germany.
Used it is a coin toss, Hitachi are good, Seagate are ok, WD is meh, but you cant avoid the failure rate, after an X amount of years the chances of it failing on some drives can up to 10% on that year, 12% on the next one, so on and so forth.
I had WD red failing after 3 years operating, one dead on arrival, brand new.
Check Backblaze stats and you will understand.
This was a study from 2021 but it still holds.
Their quote is:
“After six years we end up with a life expectancy of 65%. Stated another way, if we bought a hard drive six years ago, there is a 65% chance it is still alive today.”
Nope it wasn’t. Want to try again?
I found drives in the 10-15€ per TB range with smart values I don’t understand yet.
it was me, im in poland, but those ultrastarts are like 1000-1200PLN (4.3PLN = 1Euro) now,
we have buyer protection at OLX.pl within the country, im not sure if thats also honored in germany, but whatever You want i can buy for You and test here before i send to You if all is OK, for free from my side, You just cover the costs, i buy often at olx, sometimes i can get it face to face if its in Warsaw lol
GHD and others also sell on ebay and may offer free shipping or you can use re-shipper, or find similar recycler company in EU – I’m sure there are plenty of datacenters. I doubt it’s US specific. But nobody argues that HDD prices are inflated.
That classification is meaningless. “WD”, “Seagate” and “Hitachi” are not drive designs. Each brand has produced many unrelated families, platforms, capacities and generations with very different failure rates. Backblaze publishes failure rates by model for exactly this reason.
Nothing you linked establishes that.
The quoted 65% is cumulative survival of a heterogeneous population from new through six years. It is not the probability that a six-year-old drive you buy today will survive another year, and it certainly does not make a used Ultrastar a coin toss.
This is basic reliability engineering. The usual model is the bathtub curve: elevated early failure rate from defective units, a long useful-life region with comparatively low failure rate, then increasing failure rate from wear-out. A drive that has already survived years of operation has already passed through the early-failure part of that distribution. Wikipedia also explicitly notes that you cannot even know where a product sits on that curve without sufficient population data for that product.
So the relevant quantity for a used drive is the conditional failure rate from its present age onward, for that particular model and population. Your 65% cumulative survival number does not provide that.
“Some drives” is doing heavy lifting here. Particular models can develop high AFR as they age. There is no universal progression where HDD failure probability simply climbs 10%, 12%, 14% with age. Backblaze’s own data shows substantial model dependence, and even their current commentary treats age together with model and population size.
The 65% figure is especially bad as a universal HDD-lifetime statistic. Backblaze published another article less than two months earlier saying that, using their then-current data, 88% of drives were expected to survive six years, attributing the improvement to newer drives, servers and operating practices.
And anecdotes about one WD Red dying after three years and another arriving DOA establish nothing about the reliability of WD as a brand, much less about the reliability of some unrelated Ultrastar model.
So yes, disks fail. Old disks eventually enter wear-out. None of that supports “used is a coin toss”, “WD is meh”, or any universal age-based failure sequence. You need model-specific data.
Irrelevant anecdote
If we are talking anecdotes – in my personal experience over last decades, when I stopped overpaying for a privilege to experience early failures and switched to used drives exclusively – amount of postage I buy to RMA drives reduced drastically. IN fact, none of the used drives I bought in the last 6 years (out of about 20 or so) failed so far. And yet, I did RMA plenty of new drives in the past. But this too, is an anecdote.
No, the reasons for the that rule are still present.
Are you in US? Maybe that matters? US1 satellite and what not? 90% of all data is from Us1 on oll my nodes.
No, I moved it to the other topic the message I responded to belonged, 1 minute after I posted it here :). Nothing was deleted.
You would need to provide some quotes here. “Use what you have” is what storj repeatedly asserted
Yeah, that is immediately a no-go, let alone if you are considering buying new drives is a very bad idea – see bathtub reference above. GoHardDrive and ServerPartsDeal both have ebay stores and yes, you’ll probably pay shipping to outside of US, but various reshipping services exists, and I suspect EU might have similar datacenter recycler companies. I’m not in EU so I can’t be arsed to search.
Ehhh… It’s not an investment. It’s an expense. Buying drives periodically is part of running a server. With or without storj. Storj is not a factor here.
If you want storj to pay for your drive – this is not happening, by design. At some point it was possible accidentally, when drives were cheap, but that was not the intention.
RIght. You buy 24TB drive for yourself. and unless you need all 20TB of space at once, you give leftover to storj.
Storj cannot shrink nodes, so advice was to run many, they will all share ingress, and then you rm-rf one by one when you need to get space back.
I like to keep 40% free on my arrays, not to scramble at the last moment and to never run out of space. So when drives are cheap— I buy them. when they are expensive – I have a huge cushion of free available space.
Not meaningless, Hitachi historically had lower AFR in all models, I do not know how it is now with WD buying them off.
Seagate has some 6TB models that where horrible.
WD Reds 8TB had period of high DOA and AFR, it’s a lot of factories and a lot of different parts and supply chain so it depends and I understand that.
The used HDD are a coin toss in the sense that it depends on how many hours the drive have, if it is still early in the bathtub, it amazing, I would guess DC’s throw them out when they reach an internal EOL date or ROI is no longer motivating.
Well they are not when some SNOs are making a profit.
No, neither is littleskunk.
I noticed, it’s fine 
I call that encouragment.
Again, in case you missed, go read above, @littleskunk said he was making a profit and probably payouts should be reduced.
Now you are telling me that is not happening by design.
Can we all just pick a lane and stay on it? Pretty please?!
And @littleskunk you liked his post, he is contradicting you on this point, please sort it out, I am grabbing popcorn.
He is correct. I don’t see a contradiction there. I can follow his arguments and understand that he would be able to run his nodes most likely even cheaper than I can run mine. With enough SNO like him I might get forced out of the network. Or I just adopt and start to buy drives for a similar cheap price.
Sure I liked it. I noted down on my todo list to look for similar reseller here in Europe. I learned a few search terms that I can use for that. I can only say thank you very much. This will help me to improve my setup.
This is to add nodes. Not to add space though, to load balance and fix performance issues, because the potato nodes were choking en-masse.
I agree with them! I also of the opinion that payouts are too high and should be reduced! Specifically because they are high enough for sufficient number of people to think about turning it into a profitable business – be that buying drives or whole servers.
This is consistent, the lane stayed the same, these are the road rules I follow myself, and I’m very happy with the outcome.
- don’t buy anything for storj specifically that I would not buy for my other needs
- Don’t cheat with VPNs/multipleIPs/etc, because $20 is too cheap to sell integrity for
- Don’t expect storj to pay for anything. If they do – nice, I get some costs of running server covered.
To avoid repeating myself:
In other words, I want payments reduced to fix incentives: to prevent people with random threshold of profitability from joining – because they will leave at random, when that threshold is crossed, and create turnover/repair/unnecessary load. Storj wants stable long term operators, who don’t mind subsidy however small or large.
Some may question – but what about capacity when customers come in droves – the payments will naturally increase, with amount of data, and if storj projects to need more – they can turn the payout knob again to invite people to buy HDDs – or spin some surpluss/surge nodes themselves, if the demand is temporary.
But today – we paying too much to nodes, and dont’ have enough customers, which makes payments even smaller, by the virtue of spreading over large pool of operators, and yet, operators don’t leave. Which supports both claims: payments can be reduced and operators who stay are not chasing profit, but subsidy.
@littleskunk
You said you run you nodes on a profit, even with buying drives. That is your statement.
@arrogantrabbit
You say no SNO is ever going to make a profit, specifically “it’s never going to pay for your drive”. That is your statement
Either I am ingesting drugs without knowing or you both are screwing with me, because this is not quantum mechanics, both can’t be true and false at the same time.
Parallel universes obviously exist. 
Its simple. To make his statment correct we would have to lower the payout rate by more than 20%. At that point I would stop buying additional hard drives. Not sure what this has to do with quantum mechanics. Both statements are correct at the same time. His statment is that I shouldn’t buy additonal hard drives. I am saying the current payout rate kind of forces me to scale up. Both correct.
Please don’t get triggered by these 20%. That is just the random personal threshold he mentioned. I already hear you screaming that I would claim the entire network can handle that. I am talking about only my personal random threshold.
No, his statement is:
I said it once and I will say again, I hate being toyed with.