Building an 8 TB Storage Solution for Storj’s DriveShare

20 Jan
2016

driveshare-earnings-calculator

Recently we have tried the beta of the latest Version of Storj DriveShare GUI, a service that is intended to allow you to earn money by sharing your extra hard drive space. Although it is still not ready to be launched and you could have some issues getting to try it out, this Blockchain-based cloud storage service does look very promising. While participating in the currently ongoing beta test of the DriveShare service we’ve went on to figure out how to easily build a reliable and affordable 8TB home storage solution that can be used with the service for earning money via the Storjcoin X (SJCX) crypto currency tokens that Storj uses. Going through the earnings calculator that estimates how much can you earn sharing 8 TB of storage via the service we are getting over $230 USD estimate per month if all of the space is being used by users of the service, so it is not a guarantee that you will be earning this much for sure. So our goal was to build 8 TB storage solution with less than what you can earn in 6 months based on the earnings estimate or with other words less than $1380 USD.

8-tb-hp-microserver

Going through various small home NAS (Network Attached Storage) solutions and different small server data storage solutions we have found out an interesting choice that is compact, affordable and easy to be used by not so advanced users – the HP ProLiant MicroServer. More specifically the HP ProLiant MicroServer Gen8 G1610T 1P 4GB-U B120i Non-hot Plug SATA Server(819185-001) that is available for a about $450 USD and that only needs you to install hard drives and do the software setting up like you would with a normal PC. The MicroServer comes with 4GB of memory and a Dual-Core Intel Celeron G1610T processor, along with Gigabit network support and 4 drive bays for hard drives.

The hardware specs of the MicroServer should be more than enough for this kind of a storage solution, so all we need now are four hard drives with 2 TB capacity each for a total of 8 TB capacity. You could go for larger capacity HDDs, however the larger the capacity, the higher the price per drive will be, so at the moment 2 Terabytes offers a good price/capacity ratio and since we have 4 drive bays we can go for 4x 2 TB without having to worry about anything. There are two good options available for the hard drives, the Western Digital Red hard drives with 2 TB going for $90 USD per drive or the 2 TB Red Pro drives for $134 USD per drive. The normal Red series is intended for smaller NAS solutions, offers a bit slower performance and comes with 3 years warranty for a lower price and the Red Pro series is for more serious storage solutions with 5 years warranty, better performance and extra technologies for better reliability. So with 4x 2 TB Red drives we need to spend $360 USD for HDDs and with 4x 2 TB Red Pro drives you need to spend $536 USD or along with the HP MicroServer the total would be either $810 USD or $986 USD. Both choices would put us below the 6 month earnings estimate from DriveShare, so our goal is achieved. Now all that we need is the the service to finish testing and launch in order for such a solution to become interesting alternative to crypto currency mining by offering a home storage solution.

– For more details about the Storj’s DriveShare storage project currently in beta…






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20 Responses to Building an 8 TB Storage Solution for Storj’s DriveShare

bathr

January 20th, 2016 at 16:38

I’m curious about how much bandwidth it’s using over a few days.

admin

January 20th, 2016 at 17:29

Currently not much, because during the beta only dummy information is stored on your hard drive and it is not accessed by anyone for the moment. When you have actual user data stored however it will probably depend on the amount of data and how the user accesses it, so we’ll have to wait and see.

Bensam123

January 20th, 2016 at 23:27

Yeah also curious about data usage. I assume if it’s a storage service your connection will be fully utilized or close to it if it uses some sort of constant p2p sharing algorithm, which I assume is what is going on here.

That could make doing anything on your connection a huge PITA as well as hitting data caps depending on where you live. This may actually turn into your connection being more of a bottleneck then how many drive you can put in a raid array.

prince_gbanga

January 21st, 2016 at 06:31

Where can we find the actual specification of the mining reward algorithm (which is used by this web-calculator)? The whitepaper doesn’t seem to include enough information to make these calculations.

What sort of response time is required (i.e. between the network asking for data and the storage-provider providing it)?

mike

January 21st, 2016 at 08:23

How do I get to the calculator used in the screenshot?

admin

January 21st, 2016 at 10:52

You are not mining (storage calls it farming), you are sharing free hard drive space and you are getting paid for it being used in the crypto tokens Storj uses. The service is still in testing phase and is not fully functional with everything implemented, so there are still some unknown things that we are yet to know about.

The calculator is available on the homepage of the project – http://www.driveshare.org

Aleks

January 22nd, 2016 at 12:52

You are not gonna make 231$ with 8TB.
Accroding to latest payouts you gonna make 60$ with 25TB.

admin

January 22nd, 2016 at 13:17

The calculator estimates what could be the possible profit when the service launches with all of the 8TB storage utilized, it is not for what currently Storj is distributing as a rewards to beta testers of the service at the moment…

bathr

January 26th, 2016 at 02:54

I *think* that everyone’s drive will fill at the same rate and only get partially used because otherwise the service won’t be able to store more data.
I’m running it on 5TB for a couple of days now and the bandwidth usage is virtually nothing. All it does is pinging the server and I haven’t seen or noticed any job that I received so I think I’m not storing anything yet.

Once it gets launched and and hopefully heavily used, the bandwidth usage will get interesting. I suspect at least some of the guys sharing 25TB or even less will have to limit the bandwidth of the software or reduce the size of their share to keep up on slower internet connections.

Dem0n

January 26th, 2016 at 14:53

How do you limit your bandwidth, or is that feature not implemented quite yet?

admin

January 26th, 2016 at 15:10

Since the current version of the test software does not generate significant traffic (it uses dummy data to fill the reserved space) there is also no option implemented for bandwidth limiting yet, but when the project launches officially it should support bandwidth limiting by the user.

gizmojunkee

March 18th, 2016 at 20:17

well I run the beta program now since Nov. with about 15TB filled of test-data. I have so far received a reward of around 510-590 StorJ on a monthly basis and that does not make up for electricity or bandwidth usage. I think the idea is great however it will take years to be adopted and actually make revenue for anyone. So as much fun as it was I will unplug my drive pretty soon and rather invest in Ether.

Rushi

June 25th, 2016 at 04:04

Are there any follow up articles planned?

Nik

September 5th, 2016 at 10:49

Is this storage farming available internationally? Can I make a PC farm and join the network form Europe?
Also, If you could provide some explanation on how the profit calculator works that would be awesome. Thanks

Kalpesh

December 15th, 2016 at 08:26

I want to mine sjcx with 10 tb hdd storage.
How much profitability per month?

sepp

January 28th, 2017 at 18:49

i think it makes more sense, if more people share less space, but much bandwith.

what if 500 users need data from your harddisk? will become very slow….

coinmaster4you

February 9th, 2017 at 15:01

the point of blockchain is to make storage of information more efficient. Dropbox on steroids, much faster and cheeper. That is what Storj is aming for and I think Megaupload 2.0 wil use Storj and madesafe for storage and management, dont quote me on that, but pretty sure. Bitcache wil link files transactions to microtransactions. Storj will bee cheeper, but Megaupload 2.0 will give more services and funktions like having apps simular to dropbox.

Asim

June 20th, 2017 at 11:40

I have joined STORJ 2 days ago with a 10TB drive. Allthough it is just pinging and i haven’t received any job yet. Do anybody now when STORJ will be in full functionality?

stan

August 31st, 2017 at 12:59

hi, stan here. may i know what is the actually profit to mining storj

let say,

1, i had wd purpple 3tb x 5units and wd-purpple 4tb x4units with core i7-950/8gb-ram/sata raid-1 .what is monthly income?

2, wd-blue 4tb x10units with core i7-950/8gb-ram/sata raid-1 .what is monthly income?

3, seagate ironwolf 8tb st8000vn0022 x 12units with core i7-950/8gb-ram/sata raid-1 .what is monthly income?

please updates me asap.

thanks.

admin

August 31st, 2017 at 14:13

Actual profit is really hard to determine as you are not actually mining, you are leasing your free storage space and getting paid for that. It depends on the demand at the moment and the amount of free storage you have available, it is hard to fill large drives with data at the moment right from the start, so it will take some time and there is no guarantee that you would still be able to utilize all the resources you have available.

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