Is an account required to rent out drive space ?

No. You do not need to create an account to start earning STORJ tokens by renting your drive space.

All you need to do is run the storagenode software and configure it properly.

Note that the V2 network has been shutdown in January 2020 as v3 in Production now, so it is not possible to start farming with new nodes on V2 anymore.

You can learn about how to sign up to become a Storage Node Operator on the V3 network here.