NOTE: The whole FAQ is now available on the Threefold Manual: https://www2.manual.grid.tf/faq/faq.html
FAQ Zero-OS v3 Part 1: General, User, Developer and Validator
Very well described. Your analysis and recommendations are spot on. Just one important statement to add: your reasoning is optimized for farming (lowest investment creating the highest return / yield). For workloads higher, amounts of memory and SSD might be useful as not every developer / application requires that same ratio between cores, memory and SSD.
So although there might not be a direct return tot he farmer in TFT, it does not harm to have more 
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That is an excellent point. Indeed, there is a kind of farming (reward) logic and a grid (utility) logic so to speak. As most farmers are in partly thanks to the great ethos of Threefold, they definitely would benefit from knowing such details as you pointed out.
It would be great if we could have some main template of 3nodes and farm setups that would be for such and such tasks or goals. Farmers could then orient their choice of hardware depending on their localized situation. It could be in the form of ratios between RAM:CORE:SSD:HDD or absolute values with standard builds.
As an example, what kind of 3nodes and farm would someone need if their work is around:
- Mail/business communication server
- Streaming music and videos
- Storing files for long term storage
- Graphics and design
- Engineering and architecture
- AI and physics simulations
And so on.
For example, people could orient their type of farms if they live near an industrial center where there is a lot of engineer and AI. And they could advertise their farms to specific target audiences and so forth.
Also there can be combinations of such type of farms to cover more ground. For example, I have 3 nodes with a lot of HDD, for storage, and 2 nodes with a lot of RAM and SSD, for compute. This type of reasoning could be optimized and extended.
Finally, the current tokenomics incite people to build a stronger TF Grid as Kristof showed in a Deep Dive Session. So in a sense, this utility logic also has a strong reward logic linked to it, once farmers get to know more about the whole dynamic of the Grid!
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look i have one 
Question: If i initially boot my new created DIY Node in the middle of a month, do i fulfill the requirements (95% uptime) to get token?
Answer: For the first month the node is running, you will receive the rewards on prorated basis. That does mean, if you have the Node up and running for the last 15 days of a month, you will get 15 Days payed out.
thanks to Mahendra from Telegram 
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Alright! I add it! Thanks 
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How/what do you use to zero out your disks?
How/what do you use to load the image onto a USB stick?
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Hi @BoatGod. For zero out disks unix has a tool called “wipefs”. Every distribution should have it. So if you take an ISO image of any distribution and boot in i “try” mode. In a terminal / shell you should be able to do ```wipefs -f /dev/sd?" for all of the disk devices in the hardware . See here.
With regards to tranfering the bootloader onto USB, here’s a page in the library that gives some guidance. For a unix/linux system you can transfer the dowloaded image with the dd command: dd if=created_boot_loader_file.img of=/dev/sd? where the input file is the download d file from http:/bootloader.grid.tf and the output file (device) is the USB stick device.
Hope this helps!
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Excellent answers! And great questions from @BoatGod.
I added them in the FAQ with some editions for clarity and also updated the organization of the FAQ.
Thanks for your expertise @weynandkuijpers
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Well, those were things I had to go search for. Being a noob, I’m sure I’ll come up with more questions when my machine gets here… I used Rufus to put the image on the usb stick…
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We all start as noobs. There’s definitely some learning curve with Threefold. The more questions you have, the more answers we can add to this FAQ. That’s great!
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Modify:
Q: What is the difference between V2 and V3 minting?
V2 is being sunset. New miners should directly onboard to V3
Add:
What is a 3node?
It is essentially a single server that makes up a larger network of servers which together form the Threefold grid.
Where are my rewards?
They are distributed once a month, around the 5th. Distributions are not daily, or after a certain threshold. Note that upcoming minting rules have a 24 month lockup or until 30% utilization for 3 months on your 3node.
How much electricity does will it use?
A small DIY node based on a compact office computer will draw under 20W. A full size server will draw around 100W idling.
What kind of computer do I need to make a 3node?
Any modern computer should be sufficient, especially once you upgrade the amount of RAM and storage to increase your TFT rewards. While CPU specs are not currently measured, they may be in the future. To insure your 3node provides meaningful capacity to the network, you should have at least 1000 CPU mark per core as measured on https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu_list.php
Can I host more than one 3node at my house?
Yes, but do not host more than your bandwidth can support. If you have a gigbit connection, you can really “rack” up quite a large number of servers.
Do I need collateral?
No! Many decentralized data projects require enormous amounts of collateral, but not ThreeFold.
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Alright! That was fun to add.
Thank you for the great contribution.
Now I think people could try and find errors I might have made by writing the post or transcribing others’ thoughts, and once corrected, we should hang this in pinned post on the Telegram Channel.
We can then update it every week or so.
Also, I added the modification for the difference between V2 and V3, but kept the tokenomics part so people can see it’s a good thing for long terms.
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Lets get this thread pinned?
Done. Pinned until 1/4/2022
May I suggest adding it to the ThreeFold Documentation in the Farming section?
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That would be amazing. We’ll just have to keep it updated as new Q-As come up.
Thanks!
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