TexasUnraid

Yeah, I could see the benefits to it, there must be a reason it has not been though besides performance though. If there is money to be made someone will make it.

I could see a benefit to that, although I am pretty sure the reason they don't is that the total density of the storage would not be as good due to more wasted space around the platters. Also much harder to fit 5.25 bays in a server. Still, I would be interested in one if the price/TB was significantly better then 3.5" drives.

I should have all my old drives full later today, with 3 systems plotting I can do around ~10TB/day, although didn't bother getting the other 2 running up to this point. Now the debate is do I use my new drives to hold plots for a bit until I actually put them to use or leave them alone. I should have around ~36tb by the end of the day. I could add in another ~60TB if I put my backup drives into use but don't think it is worth it. With the price crashing not even looking like I will get my $100 back I spent on stuff lol. Feel sorry for the guys that actually bought new stuff at full price.

lol, even in that kind of bulk, still $17/tb at the starting bid. Sad, you used to be able to get those drives regularly for $15/tb. I got a few for less then $14/tb last black Friday.

Odd, I think that one synced pretty quick for me, flax is the one that took a long time for me.

I am sure you have run through this list: https://chialinks.com/exchanges/

There are quite a few expander backplanes out there, the EL1 backplanes from supermicro are this way but they would be hader to design an enclosure for. The alternate option is to get an expander card and use that for the backplane. HP sells a card that I use, works well for this kind of thing, although it is sas2/sata1 speeds. The prices on them skyrocketed though, they used to be $15, now they are $60.

Could work, getting the alignment right would be interesting but doable. Personally I think I would use wood instead of a metal case to reduce the change of zapping something, plus easier to work with.

I Have considered the same a few times. You can get sas1 backplanes for real cheap and they work just fine for chia assuming they will support over 2tb drives (my supermicro sas1 backplane works fine with a 12tb drive but have heard you can only fill 23/24 slots with any drive over 2tb). The issue with DIY'ing a backplane is getting all the tolerances and drive holders right. They will not generally fit a normal 3.5" bay pattern. With a 3D printer and some time I think it is possible though, it was my plan with my spare backplane before I stumbled on my latest cheap chassis. If for some reason I ever needed more drives I would consider it. There are a few 3D printed designs floating around that use sata breakout cables to connect the drives, no hot swap but a cheap way to add a lot of drives. Another good option on the cheap. This is the easiest and best bang for the buck option unless you really need hot swap I think.

I am using hpool for farming and madmax for plotting, so I don't even have the main chia app installed right now lol. Had a few syncing issues but they go away after a restart. Once I get everything settled in I will need to setup some startup scripts to start the farmers in the right order and give enough time for them to scan before launching the next one.

lol, I just skipped the UPS all together for the chia systems, I don't have one to spare anyways but I am not real worried about them, if they loose power, the whole house is out of power so the internet is down anyways. They are running on a dedicated 20a circuit so I don't see them tripping a breaker lol.

I didn't specifically measure it but I am guessing it is only a minor difference. The CPU's are pretty much at the max TDP during most of the process regardless so the only real extra power would be the drives themselves. So ~10w on a 450w system I am guessing lol. Now if you mean back when I had 26 drives connected to it to parallel mine, then yes that would add up for sure, figure at least 150w for the drives in that case.

Also installed the spare.farm blockchain. Looks like they re-started the blockchain to account for the massive growth it had since starting. Makes sense a lot of people spent a lot of time plotting and want to see SOMETHING for the effort lol. Syncing it now, it is amazing how fast the network grew, it was up at 40PB within 130 blocks (something like 24 hours). So far with mutiple chains using the plots, looks like the best option is to open them one at a time, let them finish scanning and then do hpool last. Otherwise I also got invalid blocks.

I installed 2x 10k drives as a temp holding spot for the plots from the ramdisk, looks like the ~300mb/s is fast enough to copy the plots over with some time to spare. Then it has 30 mins to copy it to the farming drive before the next plot. Could even use an SSD for this since it is only 100gb of writes per plot but I already have these 10k drives. So far seems to be working good, got a script running that checks for a new plot on the 10k drives every 5 mins and automatically copies it to the farming drive. A bit of manual work is required to mount the next farming drive but I can live with that for now. For reference I am seeing a peak memory usage of 251gb of ram plotting 100% in ram. Could possibly do it with 256gb of ram if you have nothing else going at all and/or have a swap setup (it should automatically move the old stuff to the swap).

Ran into an interesting issue with plotting in ram, having an issue getting the finished plot off the ramdrive fast enough so that it does not run out of room with the next plot. Works ok with faster drives but on the slower drives or as they fill up it can't quite get them off fast enough. So might have to move the finished plot to a 10k drive and then from there to the final drives. Or possibly just go back to using the 10k drive as the temp dir since it only slowed it down a bit.

Not sure I have the same faith in chia as you to flat out buy it lol. I REALLY like the idea behind it but the company only seems interested in the IPO side of the company, I don't care for public companies as a whole so that is a bit of a turn off from the start for me. I am also on the hunt for an exchange, don't care for the US based ones with KYC and have not had time to look into the options without KYC. Since I am just a small time player I don't see a reason to go all in with the KYC. Honestly if I could just convert the XCH to BTC that would be enough for me. I figure if I can get $500 of bitcoin that is better then nothing, although could be long while before I get near that at this rate lol.

I had issues when I didn't allow write access as well with hpool, no idea why. I also saw others say to always start flax/chiagreen first and then hpool/chia. I am currently farming 22tb of plots on all 3 without an issue. Won some chiagreen already.

I have mined $5 on hpool in the last few days, most of that time was with ~10tb of less online due to playing musical drives. Although Chias price keep falling, so not sure it will ever be profitable to farm it but what the heck, already got the drives and plots, I will let it ride for now. It has been a fun chance to play with my hardware in ways I don't normally get to. Plus if I can make $100 I will be out nothing.

Yeah, my 1275 did the same thing, took it overnight to get fully synced and then it calmed down. Got hppol, flax, chiagreen and nicehash on an old RX570 running on this machine. Need to check power at the wall with the drives in it, guessing around 250-300w. Hardest part is keeping the drive temps at a comfortable level in the 100-120f garage. It has some 7k rpm fans in it now, I ordered some really high static pressure delta 9k fans for $8 from china, gonna see what they do as things get warmer. Right now though I am impressed, the drives are generally around ~40c during the day and low 30's at night. Just worried when temps climb another 10-15 degrees outside as summer progresses.

It was posted in the plotman docker thread on here. There is a 3rd blockchain that can use the chia plots as well, spare.farm but the github seems to be down right now.

Well, finally got my musical drives sorted out and can get back to plotting. Just ran a test with the madmax plotter running 100% in ram. 34mins, so 4 mins less then using the raid0 10k drive array. I have to say, Madmax did a really good job of optimizing the plotter. Running in ram is great simply because you don't need to worry about thrashing drives but only gains you small amount of extra performance. Multi-threaded pipelined Chia k32 plotter - 2920125 Final Directory: /media/chia/ramdisk/ Number of Plots: 1 Process ID: 6241 Number of Threads: 32 Number of Buckets: 2^7 (128) Pool Public Key: Farmer Public Key: Working Directory: /media/chia/ramdisk/ Working Directory 2: /media/chia/ramdisk/ Plot Name: [P1] Table 1 took 14.4916 sec [P1] Table 2 took 129.525 sec, found 4294858921 matches [P1] Table 3 took 149.095 sec, found 4294851161 matches [P1] Table 4 took 184.589 sec, found 4294658713 matches [P1] Table 5 took 180.881 sec, found 4294349888 matches [P1] Table 6 took 175.914 sec, found 4293634966 matches [P1] Table 7 took 133.814 sec, found 4292281384 matches Phase 1 took 968.327 sec [P2] max_table_size = 4294967296 [P2] Table 7 scan took 9.15548 sec [P2] Table 7 rewrite took 41.606 sec, dropped 0 entries (0 %) [P2] Table 6 scan took 34.6718 sec [P2] Table 6 rewrite took 47.1672 sec, dropped 581419162 entries (13.5414 %) [P2] Table 5 scan took 29.8565 sec [P2] Table 5 rewrite took 45.144 sec, dropped 762174772 entries (17.7483 %) [P2] Table 4 scan took 29.7342 sec [P2] Table 4 rewrite took 45.7968 sec, dropped 829009177 entries (19.3033 %) [P2] Table 3 scan took 29.6592 sec [P2] Table 3 rewrite took 45.4891 sec, dropped 855165911 entries (19.9114 %) [P2] Table 2 scan took 29.2397 sec [P2] Table 2 rewrite took 43.5771 sec, dropped 865576350 entries (20.1538 %) Phase 2 took 453.969 sec Wrote plot header with 268 bytes [P3-1] Table 2 took 58.2705 sec, wrote 3429282571 right entries [P3-2] Table 2 took 32.0414 sec, wrote 3429282571 left entries, 3429282571 final [P3-1] Table 3 took 60.8781 sec, wrote 3439685250 right entries [P3-2] Table 3 took 34.8838 sec, wrote 3439685250 left entries, 3439685250 final [P3-1] Table 4 took 56.1365 sec, wrote 3465649536 right entries [P3-2] Table 4 took 33.8989 sec, wrote 3465649536 left entries, 3465649536 final [P3-1] Table 5 took 55.1382 sec, wrote 3532175116 right entries ^P[P3-2] Table 5 took 35.6375 sec, wrote 3532175116 left entries, 3532175116 final [P3-1] Table 6 took 64.5304 sec, wrote 3712215804 right entries [P3-2] Table 6 took 37.5803 sec, wrote 3712215804 left entries, 3712215804 final [P3-1] Table 7 took 69.2485 sec, wrote 4292281384 right entries [P3-2] Table 7 took 43.6463 sec, wrote 4292281384 left entries, 4292281384 final Phase 3 took 587.856 sec, wrote 21871289661 entries to final plot [P4] Starting to write C1 and C3 tables [P4] Finished writing C1 and C3 tables [P4] Writing C2 table [P4] Finished writing C2 table Phase 4 took 74.3834 sec, final plot size is 108799781942 bytes Total plot creation time was 2084.63 sec Just need to juggle a few things around yet and I can get back to plotting full time, might also start my main server plotting as well to knock it out quicker.

Thats not bad at all for that setup, 73w is plenty good for a workstation board. I think with no drives my current setup idles around 120w but it has dual CPU's and several add-in cards. with the drives and it running "normally" I am generally closer to 200w, a lot more then I would like but I got tired of constantly trying to fix consumer grade gear. Before I finally went with server gear last year I was using a bunch of old systems I hobbled together. Still got most of them in reserve. I had an old dell mobo stuffed in my old antec 900 gaming case with several 4in3 adapters giving my 12 hot swap bays. Worked really nice overall and without drives idled around ~60w IIRC. But I had a lot of issues with drives dropping out and the like, mostly due to cabling issues with the rats nest that was in there. Found a local guy selling some supermicro chassis and ended up getting 3 fully loaded servers for $600 since he didn't want to ship them and needed them gone. I was going to sell 2 of them to keep the last one for free + some profit but ended up finding uses for all of them. Plus the $35 rack looks bare with just 1 server in it. lol Looks like I won some chiagreen last night, feels strange to actually win something lol. Flax is growing fast, was 2 days to win yesterday, now it is 3 days.

Well since my chia wallet is already compermised from using hpool. I figured what the heck, I jumped on Chiagreen and flax https://www.chaingreen.org/ https://flaxnetwork.org/ As well, they use the same chia plots to farm so basically free. Not sure I put much weight on them but while netspace is still low figure I will see if I can win anything.

Everything I have seen says not to spin down drives. Apparently they spin up all the time anyways due to the random reads and if you did manage to get a proof it would most likely be too late. I was thinking about doing the same thing. The argument against it was that is the check times were too long then people could create winning plots once they see the challenge.

I am having to play musical drives right now converting them to ntfs as the btrfs driver for windows apperantly has a memory leak and if filling up my 32gb in my farming rig when used with a bunch of drives. Still going to use btrfs for the raid setups (raiding the small drives as I would have a lot of wasted space otherwise) but converting the rest to ntfs and juggling plots around. Should finish tomorrow and then get back to plotting myself. Gonna give plotting 100% in ram a go to see just how much the HDD's are slowing the process when using ran just for temp2.