THE CHIA FARM

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Rand__

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Mar 6, 2014
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I believe 2.5 drives are not useful for farming but only for plotting. That might be something to consider. How much are they asking for Ds4246?
I would say that depends on density, price/tb, space in your 'datacenter' and connectivity cost (initial and running)...

I plan to convert my 40 900g drives which are on plotting duty to storage when I am done... o/c its easier to use 2 18t drives, but I am sure the 40 2.5" are cheaper (even when considering running costs for a few months)
 
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ari2asem

Active Member
Dec 26, 2018
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I believe 2.5 drives are not useful for farming but only for plotting. That might be something to consider. How much are they asking for Ds4246?
ds4246 including 24* 4tb sas-2 hdd around 1200 euro. but i dont know which controller it is using (iom6 or iom3)...

2,5 drives are indeed for plotting.
but will EF560 work with dell seagate savvio's ??
 

gb00s

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Jul 25, 2018
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I would say that depends on density, price/tb, space in your 'datacenter' and connectivity cost (initial and running)...

I plan to convert my 40 900g drives which are on plotting duty to storage when I am done... o/c its easier to use 2 18t drives, but I am sure the 40 2.5" are cheaper (even when considering running costs for a few months)
Just imagine 1x 18TB drive dies and all the plots are gone ... 1x 900GB drive and .... how many hours and they are filled again?
ds4246 including 24* 4tb sas-2 hdd around 1200 euro ....
That would be 50EUR per 4TB drive ... most of them cost around 100EUR if I'm not mistaken.
 

Bert

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Mar 31, 2018
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ds4246 including 24* 4tb sas-2 hdd around 1200 euro. but i dont know which controller it is using (iom6 or iom3)...

2,5 drives are indeed for plotting.
but will EF560 work with dell seagate savvio's ??
That's good price given that you in Europe and we are in midst of chia craziness
 

Bert

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Mar 31, 2018
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This package was $300 2 weeks ago:



Seller just bumped the price from 800 to 1000. I think the secret is out there that you don't need expensive nvmes for chia plotting.

I wonder if this whole nvme thing was some kind of income source for chia company from flash producers. I used to see nvme ads on their web page.

According to the calculator, even today I can buy an hard drive from Costco and get return on my hard drive cost within a month. This is crazy stuff.
 

Rychek

New Member
Jul 28, 2020
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This package was $300 2 weeks ago:



Seller just bumped the price from 800 to 1000. I think the secret is out there that you don't need expensive nvmes for chia plotting.

I wonder if this whole nvme thing was some kind of income source for chia company from flash producers. I used to see nvme ads on their web page.

According to the calculator, even today I can buy an hard drive from Costco and get return on my hard drive cost within a month. This is crazy stuff.
On average you might be able to recoup your HDD cost in a month's time, but without pooling (or joining an unoffocial pool like hpool) you get nothing until you win a block. Unless you are extremely lucky, you won't be getting a block in a month with a single HDD at current drive capacities and total netspace.
 

Madhelp

Member
Feb 7, 2013
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I won my first two XCH this morning boys! I'm farming on two computers at about a rate of 20 or so plots per day and I currently have 307. Keep plugging away and hope for the best.

I'm wondering now if I should convert the coins into something else...
 
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gb00s

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Jul 25, 2018
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Congrats ... I'm working on it for 3 1/2 weeks now, finished one farm with slightly > 1K of plots. Still no single Chia. Started plotting for an additional farm almost 2 days ago ...
 

gb00s

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Jul 25, 2018
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When I'm saying a farm, I mean a server of storage. like you have two separate plots of land. I added the new server to the other ... Or is this wrong?
 

Rand__

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nah, the farmer can access one or many storage locations, thats fine (as long as the lookup duration is fast enough o/c)
 

Bert

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Mar 31, 2018
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I think it is better to set up a remote harvester as opposed to have two farmer nodes with same private key. I don't know the reason but that's what I read.
 

NateS

Active Member
Apr 19, 2021
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Sacramento, CA, US
One farmer per public IP address is recommended so that the port forwarding doesn't get too complex. I think with an advanced networking setup, this could be worked around, but it's the recommended default assuming most people are just using a consumer grade NAT router.

It's also more efficient to run remote harvesters on your storage systems, rather than exposing the actual plots via NFS or whatever to the main farmer system. With harvesters, you only need to send the (very small) challenge over the network, and then the harvester checks if the plots pass locally, as opposed to the farmer needing to read the (much larger) plots themselves over the network. But with sufficient network infrastructure, either way can work.
 

gb00s

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Jul 25, 2018
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Hmmm, ... no you get me thinking. I don't have any lookup duration warnings in the debug.log. As I said, added another storage server with an additional 40TB farm plot that is directly connected to the other. The 1st farm is just full. Chia sees both 'farms' and the count of plots is 100% correct. Both directly attached to each other via 40G IB link. Now, I changed to plotting on 3x 2.5'' HDD pools (10x 145G/ 10x 300G / 10x 900G all in RAID0) only. Optimized it for ~40 plots/per day after a day of warm-up phase. Takes about ~15hours per plot with 2x E5 2673 v3.
 

Marsh

Moderator
May 12, 2013
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Nates is right.
One full node / with farmer, multi harvest machines is good.

Initially , I was in a rush ( Chia coin fever ) , I did not setup the network correctly.
I spend the first week learning about plotting and building plotting machines.

Second week, I started deploying remote harvester machine, then I figured out that I need a
private network between harvester and plotters.

During the time that it took to transfer TB of plots to harvester using the same farming network.
the farming network is saturate, no farming was done.

Now, I have 5 harvester machine connecting to 6 plotter via a private network.
due to limit of pcie slots , I could not run 10gbe network, not all machines has onboard 10gbe .

Second best is to use USB 2.5gb Ethernet to transfer plots to harvester.
I picked up a 8 ports 2.5gbe switch for $150, few usb 2.5gbe , 2.5gbe pcie card.

Another benefit, it let me move the harvester / plot storage without taking down the entire setup.
 

Rand__

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Mar 6, 2014
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Hm maybe i should look into a leaner setup too... just checked (again) and since reaching >1k plots sometimes the look up times exceed 5s (sometimes only 0,5s, sometimes 5-6s) ... prolly due to load on storage boxes or disks moving plots back and forth.
 
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gb00s

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Jul 25, 2018
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Seems I totally misinterpreted farmer, harvester, plotter or anything else ...

EDIT: Just found my lookup times are absolutely fine: AVG-CHECK:286ms[ok] SLOWEST-CHECK:3600ms[slow] ... so there should be no issue with direct link between the two since I connected both with >1k of plots
 
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