Chia farming, plotting; array and unassigned devices

[TexasUnraid]

12 minutes ago, sota said:

i've also seen some noise about, for machines that don't have a TON of cores or stupid fast SSDs, instead of throwing MORE threads at a plot, throw LESS, down to a single. it's only the single phase that seems to benefit from having multiple cores, and since throwing cores at it doesn't scale with a whole multiplier in terms of time reduction on that phase, it might make sense.

 

Yeah, I think that is why SSD's are considered vital, people are trying to use the wrong tool for the job IMHO. They spend thousands on drives are other hardware but won't spend a few hundred (well at least before this craze started) to buy proper server mobo/cpu's to plot with.

 

We are kinda spoiled with 32+ threads at our disposal admittedly. Heck I technically have like 80+ threads I could throw at plotting if it was worth it and that doesn't even tap into the gaming rigs lol.

[sota]

got the "new" farm computer running and synced to mainnet.  haven't moved the disks to it yet, as I want to let it the wallet get fully synced as well. plus i'm going to build a crazy ghetto mobile rack to put everything on and in the garage.  **** is noisy in my basement.

[TexasUnraid]

5 minutes ago, sota said:

got the "new" farm computer running and synced to mainnet.  haven't moved the disks to it yet, as I want to let it the wallet get fully synced as well. plus i'm going to build a crazy ghetto mobile rack to put everything on and in the garage.  **** is noisy in my basement.

 

lol, I actually just got 3 full sized pretty nice racks off craigslist for $150, cannibalized 1 of them to get 1 really nice rack and one pretty good and came out with a total of $70 for the pair. I ain't complaining.

 

Don't have nearly enough equipment for both at the moment but using the 2nd as storage for spare parts.

 

They are in the garage and humming away nicely. No way I would be allowed to have those in the house. Temps stay surprisingly good when you can crank the fans to 100% and not care as well, even with it being 90-100f out there.

 

I am really sad, I had my eye on a mobo for the backup server but it went from being all over the place to sold out in a week.

Edited May 27, 2021 by TexasUnraid

[sota]

I actually have a problem: I've been doing all this testing of plot performance, and had those 4 old desktops plodding away at plotting, that suddenly I've nearly filled a 6TB drive!   i have a big stash of 4TB disks here, but they're all seagates, and they won't actually work with the WD SATA-USB cards I have here (shucked from WD mybook/element cases.)

 

#FirstWorldProblems

[TexasUnraid]

lol, yeah I had to move all my plots onto a backup 12tb drive for the time being as I didn't want to delete them.

 

I guess you are out of internal space for drives? I have never had good luck running external drives long term. Part of why I am setting of a JBOD now that should hopefully allow me to keep everything "internal".

[sota]

I'm only using the USB connections as a stop-gap, while I figure out exactly what I'm doing.

 

[TexasUnraid]

Ah, makes sense. I have been playing a lot of sneaker mail lately. Lucky for me all of my chassis are supermicro so I can swap drives between them all.

[sota]

 

Testing the ghetto rack 

[TexasUnraid]

I am considering the exact same thing for a small rack to go under the desk actually. If 2x4's were not stupid expensive that is.

[sota]

I have a pile of 2x4s, plywood, and various pieces/remnants of old projects, outside under cover.

I just stole from that as I usually do.

[TexasUnraid]

Just now, sota said:

I have a pile of 2x4s, plywood, and various pieces/remnants of old projects, outside under cover.

I just stole from that as I usually do.

 

I used to have a pile like that but cleaned up the garage last year not realizing what was going to happen to the price of lumber.

[sota]

I get yelled at by the wife, for hanging on to certain things, like left over lumber and bits.  Now who's laughing.

[TexasUnraid]

4 minutes ago, sota said:

I get yelled at by the wife, for hanging on to certain things, like left over lumber and bits.  Now who's laughing.

 

yep, been there, done that. I was going to put up more of a fight but I needed the space for the server racks I knew I wanted to get, so ended up "giving in" to cleaning out the wood and got to keep all my "junk tools I never use"

[sota]

Nice.

My wife learned long ago, do NOT mess with my stash.

I've got some... esoteric... computer bits in the attic and shed; things that I'll probably NEVER need again in my life (5.25" FDD, every tape drive imaginable, Iomega ZIP drives, MFM/RLL controllers, every flavor of SCSI controller, etc.), but i've had happen in the past, a new client call and ask if I can fix something ancient, and having those parts means I can, AND charge a princely sum for it.

 

looks like i'm going to have to order at least one thing... 16 port gigabit switch, as I seem to not have a spare one around here.  I'll cobble together a couple 5 port units I have here for now to get things working.

[sota]

r/chia is annoying me.

can't post anything new there. automatically gets removed.

[TexasUnraid]

Just now, sota said:

r/chia is annoying me.

can't post anything new there. automatically gets removed.

 

Reddit annoys me lol. I only use it as a last resort.

 

All I am really interested in is when pools are released at this point. Figure I will fill a few drives and see what the payouts are like for a week or 2 before doing much more.

[TexasUnraid]

Finding several interesting things about having 256gb of ram in my main system (got 384gb of DDR3 ECC for $225 on ebay ;-))

 

I am moving a bunch of stuff around organizing some drives and it multiple times I will move things only for it to still be cached in ram and not need to be read from disk, kinda interesting for someone that constantly watches the usage graphs.

[sota]

I would still love to have enough memory in a box to do a ram disk.  do they even have software for ram disks any more?

[TexasUnraid]

2 minutes ago, sota said:

I would still love to have enough memory in a box to do a ram disk.  do they even have software for ram disks any more?

 

Windows has software but it is very old and has issues with very large disks like this from what I heard.

 

Linux has ram disk functionality built in and works well. Although like we are finding out the drive IO is not really the bottleneck for a single plot, so the plotting speed is only marginally improved.

[sota]

Yea this chia app is definitely processor/thread bound.

I'm attempting to spin up chia6 and chia7 now (machines) to do single plot processes, continuously.  basically I'm pulling every old/spare/to-be-disposed-of machine out of the shed, seeing if it's viable, dropping a win10 install on it, and running plots.

[TexasUnraid]

lol, I am waiting till pools come out to get that serious. Got a few systems in the closet that could be pressed into service but have a feeling they will not be worth it and storage will be my limiting factor in short order anyways.

 

I am guessing between my main machines I can plot ~6-8TB a day, so it will only take a week or 2 to fill up my spare storage as I am waiting on an order for some 14tb drives from 2 months ago. Ordered them just before Chia went big since I have used up all my big drives and want to have a proper backup.

[sota]

I'm figuring if pools becomes a viable thing, I'll at least have all the hardware ready to go.

[TexasUnraid]

3 minutes ago, sota said:

I'm figuring if pools becomes a viable thing, I'll at least have all the hardware ready to go.

 

Wise idea, I have had to sort out some other issues so have not had time to spend on chia the last week.

 

Still waiting for my 10k drives to ship from ebay, seems that the seller is having second thoughts about selling 20 146gb 10k drives for $15 now that everyone is shopping for them lol.

[sota]

i'm looking at either 300GB SAS 15k DP w/ sleds for $23ea, or 600GB SAS 15k DP w/o sleds for $45ea.

debating which to get, as the 300GB are good for now, but these boxes are also my backup hardware for my hosting server, as well as unofficial backup hardware for a particular client (unofficial, as in they haven't bought it from me, and I haven't actually asked if they want to, but I've used it to disaster recovery testing of their systems.)

600GB would be a better choice for future/other use cases.  I just need to sort out what I can get sleds for.

going to see if I can get the drives for $40ea, and the sleds for $5ea.  hoping since I'll by buying 32 of them, they'll go for it.

 

[TexasUnraid]

SAS drives skyrocketed in price the last week. I was able to find lots of drives a week or 2 ago for less then $20, now they are all 2-3x the price.