We need a low cost source for large 1 Tb+ drives for it to be competitive with external drives. Our current source only goes to 320 GB.
Do you mean like a cloud storage provider? Or more like a VPS?
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If anyone is interested in running a "bootstrap node", please PM me. If you are running a bootstrap node, it means that you'll be in the list of nodes that people connect to first. It means that you need 98-99% uptime for your node, and it also means that people will probably be downloading a lot of blocks from you and using up a small amount of bandwidth. If Sia grows by 10x in the next month, you can expect to upload around 20-50GB from your node - it's not that much but it's also not trivial.
You will need forwarded ports. Ideally I think we'd like to have 10-20 people step forward as volunteers. The more volunteers that we get, the less strain that each volunteer will experience on their node.
Thanks!
This is for a stand-alone unit with internal storage which plugs into a LAN like a network attached storage (NAS) box, but runs as a personal server. You mentioned using RAID previously, but we have only one SATA port. There are 2 external USB ports so if these can be configured to use a pair of 3TB external drives then the unit could use the existing internal drive to store the blockchain and use the pair of external drives in RAID 0 for storage. Problem with external drives is they tend to have poor cooling though for continuous operation.
Part of it depends on the direction Sia wants to go - a large network of drives running in the home or a smaller network of clustered drives running in server farms.