Overview

Storage providers in the Filecoin network are in charge of storing, providing content and creating consensus.

This section contains guides to initialize and run a successful storage provider operation using Lotus and should be approached by advanced users only. You should read through and be familiar with the concepts outlined in the Becoming a storage provider guide, as well as having a Lotus node running.

High Level Full Lotus System

At a high level, this section will cover documentation and guides about the lotus-miner and lotus-worker binaries. For markets related operations, storage providers are advised to use Boost, you can check out the Boost documentation here

How to read the storage provider documentation

The guides in this section are meant to introduce high-level concepts early in the documentation and bring in more advanced topics and configurations later on.

  • The Get started segment contains a high-level overview of the tasks the lotus-miner binary does, introduces the basic economics of being a storage provider, and outlines some hardware and architectural requirements.
  • The Setup segment contains all the necessary information for initializing the storage provider on the network.
  • The Operate segment contains the necessary information about operating the storage provider daily and introduces more complex operations like SnapDeals, Batching and Index Provider.
  • The Workers segment contains guides for setting up dedicated workers for offloading tasks from the lotus-miner binary.
  • The Advanced configurations segment details all the configurations you can tune to optimize your storage provider setup.

We recommend careful reading of every existing section and gaining as much background as possible before proceeding with a Lotus storage provider deployment.

Key concepts

You should be familiar with these key concepts related to being a storage provider before moving on to the next page. The Filecoin glossary is handy when you need to look up a word or subject.

Sectors

A sector is the default unit of storage that storage providers submit to the Filecoin network. Storage providers can decide if they want to commit 32 GiB or 64 GiB sector sizes when they first initialize their storage provider. It’s not possible to change the sector size once it has been initialized on-chain.

A sector can contain data from multiple deals and clients. A storage provider can also submit “Committed Capacity” (CC) sectors. CC sectors are available to the Filecoin network as committed storage power but do not initially contain storage deals. Actively proving CC sectors can be upgraded at a later date to include storage deals in a process known as Snap Deals.

Sealed sectors A sealed sector is a sector that has been encoded to prepare it for the continuous proving process.

Unsealed sectors An unsealed sector is the raw data. Some clients request that their unsealed data be kept for fast retrievals.

Epoch

The passing of time on the Filecoin network is divided into epochs of 30 seconds in duration. For every new epoch, a subset of storage providers are elected to add a new block to the chain.

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