Chia farming, plotting; array and unassigned devices


Shunz

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good news: chaingreen is synced finally!

meh news: still a member of the 0-coin club.

bad news: 2 of my plotters apparently decided "hey, let's update!" even though I told them NOT TO.  So i'm behind in finishing these drives.

 

if it's not one thing...

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lol, I spent an hour last night trying to get everything going again after adding some new drives and restarting the system. Kept not wanting to add the new drives and then one would fail and I would have to stop all of them and restart the process.

 

That said should have the final plots for my old drives finished in the next hour.

 

I have 3x 14tb drives sitting here but just not sure I want to put a bunch of hours on them needlessly since these will be holding my important data once I get around to swapping drives in my main server.

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2 minutes ago, sota said:

considering I've got drives with > 40k hours on them, I wouldn't worry about a couple thousand. :D

 

True, I have a few drives like that as well but I also tend to notice that around the ~40-50k hour mark is where I have started to see issues in the past.

 

Makes sense when you consider that 42k hours matches a 5 year warranty.

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lol, you sound like me, I went into my 3x craigslist server deal with full intensions to sell 2 of them to pay for the 3rd.

 

Next thing you know I have justified keeping all of them and then buying more stuff I "needed" to make them viable.

 

On the plus side I now have a good home media server and a complete backup just in case. Along with a test server for whatever (such as plotting).

 

Then I saw another deal for a 24 bay chassis and just had to snap it up, tossed my old consumer server gear in it and it is running the farm since it is the most power efficient.

 

Truth is that only the farm and my main server are even on most of the time and they are both overkill for what they are doing.

 

The one thing I can never seem to get even enough of though are drives, I keep getting more and then I somehow keep filling them up lol. Don't even have a complete backup right now, just the irreplaceable stuff.

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that last part, was why I started buying 4TB drives in bulk, for prices of < $10/TB.

I use them to make a backup of my large storage array that unRAID manages, then duplicate the backup disks themselves.

it would be nicer to have matching 10TB disks to what's in my unRAID array, but I'm looking for cheap and dirty for cold storage.

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so at some various point in the not too distant future, my last 4TB drive currently attached will be filled.  that'll be 15x36 (540) plots completed.

once that happens, I'm going to leave the 3 harvesters running, until the local temp storage drives have filled (18x3=54 plots), and the plotters have got their 1 and done can't move because the local temp is full (20 more plots), or just a bit over 2 more 4TB disks.  after that, I'll work out what to do with everything. the NR12000 takes 12 disks, while I wanted to take the MD1000 offline since I'm pretty sure it's a power whore, I'll be tempted to keep it active, as that'll be 27 disks, 108TB, or 972 K32 plots.

 

also contemplating if I want to jump into the deep end of the pool with linux, and figure out how to potentially use that mergerfs to stop having so much wasted space

Edited by sota
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I saw some 10tb sas drives for $10/tb just before chia I was seriously considering grabbing but went with the 14tb shuckable drives for $15/tb instead.

 

I have not used mergerfs myself but heard it works good, I just went with unraid instead.

 

For those extra disks, could setup an external jbod, depends how the chassis is setup but in my supermicro chassis I can simply disconnect the mobo so only the backplane is powered and then use a long sas cable to connect the backplane to my other server. Several options for it assuming you can just power the backplane and it doesn't use much power.

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anyone else trying to use madmax plotter and seeing the unraid array go offline or become unresponsive?

 

I'm plotting to /tmp/plotting so that RAM is used, but UNRAID seems to not be able to handle this. In the middle of phase 1 is where things go south and UNRAID seems to have an brain aneurysm.

Edited by ryanhaver
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First check the memory usage and make sure it is not running out of memory.

 

second, don't use the stock ramdrive, I would create a custom ramdrive for this. It is quite simple in linux. First create a new directory in /mnt called ramdrive (might need to chmod 777 it) and then run the following command:

 

mount -t tmpfs -o size=110G chiaramdisk /mnt/ramdisk

 

Obviously you can change the size with the size argument.

 

I had no issues with my setup as long as it didn't run out of memory, if it ran out, then it had issues but I had limits in place to keep a complete shutdown from happening.

Edited by TexasUnraid
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Yeah, that doesn't surprise me, unraid is good in some ways and not so good in others.

 

I still use it mostly due to the GUI interface for most things and the ability to store data on individual disks completely separate.

 

It has some weird interactions with ram usage and disk usage though for sure.

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noticing the other 3 plotters (chaingreen, spare, flax) don't seem to be passing as many plots as chia.  note that all plots were farmed on chia. and they seem to be drawing more CPU cycles than chia, especially chaingreen and spare.

 

also still no other rewards, other than me "winning" for chia block 474710.

Edited by sota
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