Recently we have tried the beta of the latest Version of Storj DriveShare GUI, a service that is intended to allow you to warn 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.
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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