I would probably end up wanting to store (as far as I can tell ATM) about 5TB - working up from a much lower amount incrementally according to the importance of the chunks of data. Is there some way of calculating currently on how much storage I would need to supply to the system so that the storage costs of my own data are covered by the income generated by my supplied storage?
Does this make sense? Is there already a post covering this sort of calculation? It would be good to have some sort of SAFE site indicator to display the value of this calculation.
There is no way to tell at the moment, although there are some smart folks on here that I’m sure could take a highly educated guess.
One thing to note though, you will always be able to cover the cost of a fixed upload over time, as you only pay once to upload, and then the data is stored and accessible forever.
So it’s more a question of how quickly you would be able to recoup the costs of upload.
Ah yes, good point! So I guess the my question should be modified to:
“Is there some way of estimating currently on how much storage I would need to supply to the system so that the storage costs of my own data are covered by the income generated by my supplied storage? OR Estimating how long it will take for supplied x amount of storage to cover my initial upload cost?”
I wouldn’t like to try and put any numbers in this.
There are factors (e.g. redundancy, network overheads, additional features) that suggest it will cost more than running your own hardware. But running your own hardware has costs that you generally don’t count, and which may well be less efficient.
So maybe the closest comparison should be with commercial cloud storage.
There are reasons to think Safe may be more efficient in some areas (no profits, no business overheads such as customer support), or you could probably argue it will cost more because commercial operations may have economies of scale (hardware cost, energy sourcing). Then again, home farmers who don’t care about profit much may help keep the costs lower than cloud storage because of the benefits they perceive from using Safe, not just for storage and the convenience or qdos they feel from earning this rather than paying for it with fiat.
So I’d approach this question by suggesting you look at the cost of this using commercial cloud storage and then apply an error band. But I wouldn’t bet my house on this or any estimated numbers.
That sounds like a reasonable approach. In my case I would be using my existing LAN setup - say 3 desktop machines and a Pi but there are upcoming purchases of more hardware necessary for my BioMed research projects too - I would not include the cost of that hardware or the electricity to run them in my calculation - but I WOULD have to include the cost of upgrading the monthly Internet cost from Fibre to the Node to Fibre to the Premises for the Order of Magnitude increase in connection speeds and costs . .
Beware that 1TB of farming is not going to happen quickly because you provide 1TB of space! There are lots of assumptions and unknowns when doing this calculation atm, yet when we see numbers we tend to forget that, especially if they haven’t been provided with error bars.
Ah yes . . of course . . it will be interesting to see how this all works out but I still think some sort of web indicator for these sorts of considerations would be good / useful! (- even if the numbers were only ball-park estimates).