This guy did some tests with chia mining. I can't tell how realistic or useful these tests are though.
At least it crushed my dreams of using a RAMDisk instead of SSDs, the largest machine I have only has 1TB of RAM
You could still run like 3 or so plots at a time w/ 1TB of ram.
This guy did some tests with chia mining. I can't tell how realistic or useful these tests are though.
At least it crushed my dreams of using a RAMDisk instead of SSDs, the largest machine I have only has 1TB of RAM![]()
The problem is that ram doesn't really give much speedup over a fast SSD, as you quickly become CPU limited, so the extra expense isn't really worth it. It's like ~4 hrs/plot with a ramdisk vs ~5 hrs/plot on a good NVMe SSD, and you can do a whole lot more in parallel on SSDs than on ram.You could still run like 3 or so plots at a time w/ 1TB of ram.
He may have been kidding, but unfortunately over on r/chia there are a lot of people with more money than technical knowhow considering exactly that until someone fills them in. Just in case anyone in a similar situation runs across this post, I wanted to mention here as well why that's not a good idea.NateS i believe lowfat was just kidding. Ever researched how much 1TB of ram would cost?
Ram prices are already way up from 2 months ago.I just don't want ram prices to do what ssd & hard drive prices are currently doing lmao
Right, I came to write the same - have you been watching RAM prices? More than double, surpassing 3x from a few months ago already...Ram prices are already way up from 2 months ago.
It's not beyond the dreams of avarice - I'm sure there'll be at least a handful of people here with 1TB servers at home. 64GB RDIMMs run at about £300 each here, so worst case buying retail you're looking at £5000 - and if you're getting through a reseller or using s/h ex-enterprise gear, possibly half that.NateS i believe lowfat was just kidding. Ever researched how much 1TB of ram would cost?
ramdisks on linux are dead easy (either using tmpfs for a ready-made filesystem, or the brd kernel module if you need a block device for whatever reason) and there's certainly plenty of utils on windows to allow them as well. I've got no idea what the access patterns of chia are like or what "work" it's actually doing - the number of people saying people are using big fat arrays of platters suggests to me IO speed isn't of prime importance - but if you've got 1TB of RAM lying unused and you wanted to hop on this particular bandwagon to the bottom, at least you wouldn't need to thrash your SSDs to shreds in the process.Are they? I mean, using RAM as ramdisk requires linux and some knowledge, no? And it's just so much more expensive than ssd anyway.
Destroying something of real value (SSDs can't really be recycled) to make money means you suck as a person. Screw all people burning out SSDs on Chia to greedily make a buck.Just roughing it, 2TB P3600 is rated for like ~11pbw, so 11000tbw at 1.2tbw/per plot is 9166 plots that are 100gb plot files which I am rounding to 1 petabytes of plot files. So if 64gg dimms are $300 you need 32 of them or $9,600 worth. There are 2TB P3600s for $500 on ebay right now. So you could buy about 19 of them for cost of 2TB RAM. So, unless you have plans to make more than 19 Petabytes of plots files, you are better off buying the SSD.
This does not consider though that you could resell the RAM but not the SSDs without a steep discount. Still though I don't think RAMdisks make sense unless your ambitions are huge. Also you can have multiple SSDs in one high core count computer to run more plots in parallel on a single system than a RAMdisk and plots per day is the important metric not whether a RAMdisk creates them a little faster,. Also, your cost of the supporting hardware, cpus, chassis, electricity etc... per plot created are much lower with SSDs from being able to stick multiple in each system and running more plots per parallel on the same system than a RAMdisk.
But yeah burning out SSDs sucks but it will probably be a much better return than a bunch of RAMdisk systems.
If I fudged the math I am sure someone will point it out.
I get that writing to SSDs destroys them, so using them for business is also slowly destroying them to make a buck in a literal interpretation - but they last years to decades in this case, and businesses use them to create other real-world value. e.g. Building things in the real world that people use. Chia farmers are using them to create no value - just to prop up another speculative pyramid scheme.Destroying something of real value (SSDs can't really be recycled) to make money means you suck as a person. Screw all people burning out SSDs on Chia to greedily make a buck.
Is it any different/better/worse than using tons of electricity that comes from burning oil or horribly sooty coal to power bitcoin miners and the pollution that comes with it that statistically causes many deaths per year?Destroying something of real value (SSDs can't really be recycled) to make money means you suck as a person. Screw all people burning out SSDs on Chia to greedily make a buck.