The mention of AWS was a counter to the notion there is one good solution. 
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My Banana Pi is supposed to arrive tomorrow, Iāll let you know how it handles @happybeingās Pi scripts.
I blagged a cheap raspberry Pi2 of Ebay tonight, little bit of last minute sniping :-), so I can move my Pi-hole onto that and free up my Pi4 for another vault.
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Running Linux on your phone with Android underneath: AnLinux 
Hmm, could be an easy way to run a Safe Node on mobile or tablet!
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I suppose technically, Android has always run on Linux!
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Iāll bet these guys would be happy to add full a Safe Browser with Nodes to their app store. Iām migrating to e foundation myself. I had issues unlocking the phone I had so my migration is delayed.
They allow you to still install apps from googleās store as well.
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Iām sure itās probably overkill, but the used Sun/Oracle rackmount systems are rock solid. I recently bought a Sun Server X3-2L with 12 hot swappable 3TB SAS drives, 64 GB of RAM, and dual 6 core Xeon processors for $600 on Ebay. Oracle still makes variants which leaves a clear upgrade path into an X4-2L, X6-2L, etc. I have have an older variant the Sun x4270 M2 running as my main storage system for the last 2 years running non stop. I had a supply go out (redundant supplies are hot swappable) and a disk, but parts are easy to come by and cheap. Big server farms are liquidating these all the time. I typically run FreeBSD, but ZFS on Linux has come a long way. You can easily setup the 12 disk array to use 10 disks for storage and 2 for parity for better up time. Downside is power consumption. It costs me about $40/month to run my little server farm. I could reduce this by removing a CPU and some RAM, but I havenāt been too bothered by it yet.
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An interesting option, thanks. Can you ballpark some power consumption per GB figures. I think this will be an interesting comparison metric when we have an idea of how nodes perform wrt puts, gets, bandwidth and rewards.
What other key metrics should we gather?
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Perhaps a multiple of KPI as quality indicatorā¦ performance x energy useage, perhaps would show willing to acknowledge environmental concerns in a way that PoW tends to not do.
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Someone could provide a good plug and play solution? I want to be part of farming but I dont want to have a lot of work with configurations, balancing and so onā¦
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Oracle used to have a power calculator for the X3-2L but I canāt seem to find it any more. Here is one for the X7-2L which is newer but configured about the same way: Oracle Server X7-2L Power Calculator
Depending on workload it is consuming somewhere between 250W to 500W. Assuming worst case 500W, the system uses 0.5kW * 24hr * 30 days = 360kWh per month. Assuming 30TB usable space power consumed is 360kWh / 30000GB = 0.012 kWh per month per GB stored.
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A high end Odroid with 2x16TB drives will consume
- odroid 2 to 5 watts
- drives 2 to 10 watts each
this gives a figure of 6 to 25 watts. And I am overstating the max power.
Thus 30TB useful disk space
In the past the higher end odroids have been more than enough to run a vault/node and the later ones are more powerful & more memory.
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Iād be very hesitant to have a storage system with 0 redundancy. I would have at least one more drive for parity. Pricing out a system like this, say the 16TB drives are ~$350 a piece and the Odroid with case, etc. youāre looking at about $1200. Assuming $0.10 kWh and 20W continuous, youāre looking at $17 a year to run this system (basically free). Comparing this to used enterprise hardware that can be purchased for $600 at a cost of ~$40 a month in energy (most likely an overestimate, depends on system load), youād make up for the Odroid hardware costs in about 15 months, which is probably worth it. For a typical home internet connection this would be a good setup. If you have a 1Gbps fiber connection (which I pay dearly for 
) and assuming the Safe Network can saturate that link with traffic requests, Iām not sure the Odroid system could handle that amount of data. Maybe its good enough?
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Well technically the Safe network is the redundancy and since these new drives are a lot more reliable then previous Iād say a RAID configuration is not essential. Also periodically checking the SMART status will alert you to a degraded disk.
I bought a Odroid with case/heatsink made for a single drive NAS and the unit with heatsink which mounts the single drive was around the 100$ mark at the time, plus a little for a power pack.
I know if you want your unit to survive a unexpected drive loss then a 3rd drive would be needed. Also these can be mounted in a PC case costing < $100 and that includes the power supply. That way you could build up to a multi SBC as time goes on using the one case.
I only present this as a viable alternative and realistically does not need to cost $1200.
$100 - Odroid
$100 - PC case with power supply
$??? - $350ea for new 16TB or $100 for 2nd hand 10TB drives
Odroids (8 cores) can handle 1Gbps network connections with (from memory) can handle ~100MBytes/sec transfers. It is (extremely) highly unlikely the Safe network will require that sort of sustained speeds for a single node
It really depends on what you want to achieve exactly and the 2nd hand server has the ability to be setup in a multi node configuration allowing a greater utilisation of the internet link with redundancy for power etc
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Iāve been waiting for this for a while
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These guys have some really cool equipment feels like its almost catered to us, plug and play.
Imagine getting one of these babyās plaster some SAFE Farming logos on them and sell them as farming rigs, already pre-setup for customers 
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Honestly, the best thing to do would be to get a QNAP or Synology NAS that can use an SSD cache and run Docker images. Use that to just run the vaults directly from the NAS.
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Yes, those would be ideal choices. I would only recommend such a solution to people who are technically savvy, and once it was confirmed Maidsafe was planning on releasing an official Docker container for their vault. Iām sure users here would containerize a vault themselves and supply their docker files to other users if Maidsafe does not (I probably would, myself), but Iād still feel much more comfortable with one officially supported. Also, maximize the ram on those systems. They āofficiallyā support 8GB, but Iāve seen people on Reddit claiming 16 and even 32GB is supported by the hardware.