HOW TO MINE STORJ & HOW PROFITABLE IS IT?

 Storj is one of the altcoins that are backed up by a real and functioning product. It’s not news that traditional cloud storage services such as Dropbox and Amazon are getting obsolete. Centralized storage lacks in both safety and privacy. That’s why startups like Storj and Minebox are gaining popularity so quickly.

Storj is a decentralized storage system that allows you to keep your files encrypted and safe. No hacker attack can affect your files since they are kept in a decentralized p2p network. I invite you to check this article if you’d want to find out more on how and why Storj works.

Unlike its competency, Storj is meant to be used by common folks like you and me. The whole idea behind the coin is to allow common people to rent and profit from their unused HDD space and internet bandwidth. However, it is also possible to make dedicated HDD Storj mining rigs.

IS THIS THE RIGHT TIME TO START MINING STORJ?

If you have been following Storj for a while, you probably know that some people complain that it takes weeks to rent more than 100 GB of HDD space. This is of course due to the lack of demand, which is caused by the lack of popularity of the service.

Storj team knows that and they are taking steps to fix this issue. In fact, one of the greatest breakthroughs is that not long ago they have signed a partnership with FileZilla. Filezilla is a popular FTP client that saw light back in 2001.

Thank to the partnership, people who use Filezilla will soon be presented with the option to upload and secure their files through Storj. This will advertise Storj to more than 15 million people per month. 

 Personally, I expect this to be a game changer for how Storj HDD renting works. The partnership was signed eight months ago and since then both companies have been working on the software integration. Many people, me including, expect to see the results soon. 

 Storj coin is getting more attention lately, too. In the past six days, there was a price increase from 28 cents per coin to 93 cents per coin.I believe that Storj is steadily moving forward, which is why I invite you to set up your Storj HDD mining rig. I already have mine up and running.

HOW TO MINE STORJ COIN

Setting up a Storj mining rig is easy. In fact, this is one of the reasons why people usually prefer Storj over its competency. Let’s see how it is done:

I installed on my 1st mining rig (really my first haha) two 3TB HDDs, first one is Western Digital Blue 3TB (WD30EZRZ) internal SATA HDD and the second one is Seagate Expansion Desktop Drive 3TB external USB 3.0 HDD. 

Since my CPU is dual core, i can set two nodes only, two HDDs.

1 Western Digital Blue 3TB Internal HDD installation

A)

• First shut down your rig
• Connect HDD with SATA connectors
• Power on the rig

B)

In many cases the HDD will not be visible if you access “This PC” / “My Computer”, you will have to create the partition volume

• In search bar type “disk partitions” and click it
• Once the Disk Management window is open you will receive a popup with disk initialization, select GPT (GUID Partition Table) and click OK
• After disk initialization HDD space is unallocated, right click on it and select “New Simple Volume“, click next , give a name your HDD, wait for the quick format and finish.

 2 Seagate Expansion Desktop Drive 3TB installation
For external HDDs the installation is much simple, no need to shut down the rig 

• First of all you will have to plug usb and power cabble to HDD
• Connect USB cable with Motherboard’s USB port and turn the HDD ON
• Wait couple of seconds for Windows to discover it
• That’s it

 3 Connect the HDDs with Storj and start renting the space

• Click “Add Drive” button
• Enter Ethereum payment address
• Select HDD partition and create a new folder inside like “Storj3TB“, select the folder
• Choose how much space you want to rent and click “Next“
• On “Connection Settings” i usually choose “Random” and click “Next“
• That’s it, repeat this steps with each new HDD/Space you add

 4 Additional & Mandatory Settings

• Step 1: Synchronize your clock https://docs.storj.io/v1.1/docs/storj-share-gui#section-311-ntp-synchronization-for-windows
• Step 2: Firewall rules https://docs.storj.io/v1.1/docs/storj-share-gui#section-51-windows-firewall
• Step 3: Monitor nodes https://docs.storj.io/v1.1/docs/nodes-monitoring

STORJ MINING PROFITABILITY CALCULATOR

 Let me start this by telling you that there is no precise way to calculate your income with Storj. While this might sound harsh, let’s not forget that it is not possible to calculate the exact mining profitability of any cryptocoin to begin with. Sites like Cryptocompare do offer calculators that let you estimate your income, however expectations rarely match reality.

Having that out of the way, let’s take a look at the numbers you can expect from renting your HDD space to Storj.The basic income formula is $ 0.015 USD per GB you rent with an additional $ 0.05 USD per GB downloaded. This means that by renting 100 GB, you will get $ 1.50 USD per month, being the case the data owner does not access the data.

This means that in order to get a monthly income of at least $ 90 USD you’d have to rent 6 TB of HDD space.

There is also electricity costs involved. According to calculations, an idle PC consumes about 75 W, considering its HDD is spinning. If you use your PC two hours a day, you’d have to make Storj pay for the remaining 22 hours. In this scenario, the costs would average at $5.94 per month with an electricity fee of 0.12 $/KWh.

This means that it is not profitable to rent less than 400 GB of HDD space, being the case you are using your PC for an average of two hours a day and letting it run with Storj for the remaining 22 hours/day. Now, if for some reason your PC is already running for 24 hours a day, then allocating some of its HDD space to Storj would result in pure income.

STORJ MINING PROFITABILITY

While the mentioned formula seems pretty straightforward and easy, it is important to remember that you get paid for every GB you rent and not for the amount of GBs you made available for renting. This means that you might assign 6 TB to Storj, but you will get paid only for the amount people actually use, which might be only about 100 GB the first month. Again, I do expect this to change soon after Storj gets fully integrated into Filezilla. We will see.

Note: I have noticed that external HDDs get more contracts than internal ones. I haven’t found an explanation to that yet. However, the difference is real and steady, so I’m taking that into account for any future additions to the rig.

Nodes

There is away to increase your profits with Storj by using a PC with a multi-core processor. Every processor counts as a node, so a dual-core processor will provide you with two nodes.

This was not possible until not long ago, when developers added an option to control the assigned resources and thus run multiple nodes on one PC, according to the amount of cores it got.

In Conclusion

Storj is a project that is being developed by a team of professionals. Their aim is to give common people access to decentralized file storage. I like the steps they are doing so far to achieve this goal. If the partnership with Filezilla works as intended, then the demand issue will probably be solved overnight.If you are interested in Storj mining, then I recommend you to bookmark this page and get back here to from time to time so you can keep an eye on the latest updates.