Chia farming, plotting; array and unassigned devices


Shunz

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8 hours ago, tjb_altf4 said:

Did you measure power usage by any chance ?

That would be an interesting comparison to see if it was a noticeable or negligible difference.

 

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.

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1 hour ago, sota said:

speaking of power, those 3 DL380's plus the farm computer and MD1000, are now running the UPS right on the ragged edge of overload. :eek:

 

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.

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did anyone else have a problem recently with 1.1.6?  While I was installing the other PoST coin apps, I had to stop chia, then when I restarted it, it refused to sync.  A couple hours on, and I finally said **** it, and installed 1.1.7, in the hopes that it would fix... something.  Apparently it did, as after a couple minutes it started to sync back up.

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2 minutes ago, sota said:

did anyone else have a problem recently with 1.1.6?  While I was installing the other PoST coin apps, I had to stop chia, then when I restarted it, it refused to sync.  A couple hours on, and I finally said **** it, and installed 1.1.7, in the hopes that it would fix... something.  Apparently it did, as after a couple minutes it started to sync back up.

 

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.

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while waiting for my NR12000 to ship, i'm snooping around on fleabay, at backplane boards, wondering if I can't franken-rig one of them some how. lots seem to have 3x mini-SAS ports on them for 12x drives, and standard D-style power connectors. half wondering if I can't gut one of these mid-tower cases down, trick the power supply into starting, drill some holes and mount the drives and the backplane in there, then run a cable out to my LSI 9200-8e card.

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3 minutes ago, sota said:

while waiting for my NR12000 to ship, i'm snooping around on fleabay, at backplane boards, wondering if I can't franken-rig one of them some how. lots seem to have 3x mini-SAS ports on them for 12x drives, and standard D-style power connectors. half wondering if I can't gut one of these mid-tower cases down, trick the power supply into starting, drill some holes and mount the drives and the backplane in there, then run a cable out to my LSI 9200-8e card.

 

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.

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3 minutes ago, sota said:

I was just going to take everything out of a case, literally drill some holes in the side of it that match the bolt pattern for holding 12 drives in the proper alignment, and stuffing everything in it.  I don't 3D print. :D

 

 

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.

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bigger problem is finding an appropriate backplane.

most of the ones i'm seeing are passive, so I'll need more adapter cards to hook them up.  I'd rather find an expander backplane.

HighPoint EJ340 presents an interesting idea, but i'm still working up the $/drive-connected price.

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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.

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1 hour ago, sota said:

looks like I'll get to 540 plots before I call it a day.

 

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.

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I'd personally, spin up everything I could that I have here, that's not in use for anything, but only if I can do so without a butt ton of power consumption.

 

This is the moment I wish manufacturers had listened to a want I've had for years:

monstrous capacity, moderate speed, low power consumption.  gimme a 5.25" Full Height drive, running at 3600rpm, and 100TB of capacity, for like $500.  it only has to be fast enough to handle roughly 1.5 4K streams I'd say, and I don't care if it take 10-15 seconds for it to spin fully up (that'll help keep the power use down, with a lower strength motor.)  if you did that whole thing seagate is doing with multiple actuators, that should handle access times nicely.

Edited by sota
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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.

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there might be more wasted space, but the platter diameter increase will more than make up for that in terms of increased surface area.

if you consider just the total surface area of the 3 circles, 2.5", 3.5" and 5.25", you'll find the latter is 2.5x the middle, and nearly 5x the first.  that's excluding the losses incurred by the spindle itself, which will hurt the smaller drives more I suspect.  in the worst case, just going to 5.25" should be able to get you a 50TB disk, in common 1" format. that also doesn't take into account the 60% increase in drive height you can do with a true HH 5.25" format.  if we take a rough guess of 50% increase in platter count, now you're at 75TB at least, and that's with throwing a away any optimizations that would/could be done by the format change.  I think 100TB in 5.25" HH is on the low side.  If throughput were an actual problem, I'd say go true dual actuator sets; inner half and outer half, and have the drive report as 2 separate devices. you can tune what and where data is archived on the drives.  otherwise we just go back to the good/bad old days of partition splitting a drive. :D

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9 hours ago, tjb_altf4 said:

Also I wouldn't trust random having the private key, what you buy the hardware, pay the power bill, but he could still swipe the loot?
And you'll need to wipe if you want to pool?  Yeah no thanks haha.

 

lol, didn't even think about the plots being part of the price.

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