So... I am kicking myself right now for not jumping on board with Storj during the initial crowdsale. I feel like I'm just playing catch up. So... I'm setting up a driveshare machine and working to accumulate 10,000 SJCX really quick. I'm considering tinkering with one of the Synology NAS's to use it as a Storj device. I saw a mention of it but no one seems to have followed up on the development yet. I extracted their firmware and it looks pretty doable, but I've yet to buy a device yet.
My friend is doing the same on those Taiwan made boxes. Let me find that picture first.
And the price is going up again :
https://poloniex.com/exchange#btc_sjcxWhat Taiwan made boxes are you referring to? I wasn't excited about paying $175 for a Synology box, but it looks like it would pay for itself in saved electricity over 4 years... if it runs at 19 watts as advertised. I'd be glad to switch to another manufacturer. I know Shawn had talked about some "branded" hardware during the Trial A video, but I don't know what he used.
Just a little cubietruck at the moment. Most barebones linux machines will probably do the trick.
The problem with tiny barebones linux-based machines (thinking RPi and Beaglebone) is that they lack the SATA.
This Cubietruck:
http://www.cubietruck.com/collections/frontpage/products/cubieboard2-allwinner-a20-arm-cortex-a7-dual-core-development-board looks fine, but I'm not interested in paying $65 for it when most of the chip will be idled (even useless if we develop a stripped kernel for efficiency). This looks like a good time for a worldwide search for the optimal hardware.
Regarding the lack of SATA on the Raspberry Pi, there have been various solutions proposed to this problem, including USB to SATA adapters. Some interesting discussions/practical instructions on how to accomplish this can be found here:
http://raspberrypi.stackexchange.com/questions/360/can-i-attach-a-sata-controller and here:
http://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=91&t=91131I'm aware of the USB adapters for Raspberry Pi's, but I have a pretty substantial belief that using that kind of setup would introduce an inevitable bottleneck. It may be worth trying, but I'm guessing either the RPi processor won't be able to keep up with IO operations on the network or the USB/SATA interface will introduce a bus bottleneck. There is one way to find out! I do have the hardware for that so I might give it a run tonight.
Great, please report back with your test results! Also, I forgot to mention a possible alternative, the Banana Pi, which already has SATA integrated and is all around more powerful, but still compatible with many RPi accessory boards:
http://bananapi.com/http://liliputing.com/2014/04/banana-pi-a-57-rasperry-pi-clone-with-a-faster-cpu-more-memory.htmlyou can pick up a Banana Pi (or Raspberry Pi) at newegg, which means, you can pay for it with bitcoin!
http://liliputing.com/2014/04/banana-pi-a-57-rasperry-pi-clone-with-a-faster-cpu-more-memory.html