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The farm took a hit

I went to replace what I thought was the loud TR-004 with a new one. After swapping drives around and powering it up the TR-004 decided it had one drive of 54TB and btrfs couldn't mount it as the other drives were missing. This is despite the dip switches on the back being set to JBOD mode. Pressing the Set button on the back didn't help. Changing the dip switches to individual mode didn't help. Swapping everything back into the original TR-004 didn't help either. I ended up wiping the array and reinstalling everything. I have been filling it up, currently we're up to 320 plots. Using 16TB drives they hold 560 plots with a bit of free space left over. I have it doing a defrag which has been going for 3 days now. It needs enough free space to do the defrag. Its online while doing the defrag meaning the harvester can still access the plots. You'll notice I said above what I thought was the loud TR-004. It turns out it wasn't the loud one. For a bit of context ...

August 2025 update

I am currently filling out the last TR-004 which has 4 x 16TB drives in a raid0 configuration. Its point 8 on my July post. Its doing the last 60 plots which should take it up to 560 plots. One of TR-004's is making a loud humming noise which I think is the fan not working properly so I will look at replacing it. They have a 2 year warranty so I might RMA it once I have another one to put the drives is so there is minimal down time. I took all the drives out and reseated them in the sleds to try and troubleshoot it. The other three TR-004's only make hard disk noises. Chia's current price is 9.13 USD as I type this. At this point I could look at replacing the smallest drives in the farm which are 8TB drives (point 2 on my July post) with something larger or I could add another Raspberry Pi5, TR-004 and four new drives. Maybe the US SEC's "Project Crypto" will improve the price although most likely Bitcoin will be the currency that people invest in.  

July 2025 update

  I currently have 4350 plots taking 430.5TiB spread between 8 harvesters. Current storage consists of: Main storage is a PC with 10 x 20TB drives running ZFS in raidz2 (1460 plots). Secondary storage is a PC with 7 x 8TB drives running ZFS in raidz1 (397 plots). Pi4 (4GB) plus 2 x 16TB USB drives running btrfs in single mode (280 plots). Pi4 (4GB) plus 2 x 16TB USB drives running btrfs in single mode (275 plots). Pi5 (8GB) plus TR004 with 4 x 16TB drives running bftrs in raid0 mode (560 plots). Pi5 (8GB) plus TR004 with 4 x 16TB drives running btrfs in raid0 mode (560 plots). Pi5 (8GB) plus TR004 with 4 x 16TB drives running btrfs in raid0 mode (560 plots). Pi5 (8GB) plus TR004 with 4 x 16TB drives running btrfs in raid0 mode (268 plots, filling up).  Full node is an Intel I5-11000 PC with a U.2 enterprise SSD for work space (currently on its 3rd) plus a couple of M.2 SSD (boot drive, spooling drive). It has 128GB of RAM and a 10GbE NIC. Even the enterprise SSD's wear out. A...

March 2025 update

I currently have 2597 plots spread between 4 harvesters. Due to heat I have had the Chia farm off for multiple days which doesn't help with winning blocks or for filling up the 2nd TR-004. Current storage consists of: Main storage is a 10 x 20TB machine running ZFS file system, raidz2 (1460 plots) Secondary storage is 7 x 8TB machine running ZFS file system, raidz1 (397 plots) Pi5 (8GB) + TR004 with 4 x 16TB drives running bftrs file system, raid0 (560 plots) Pi5 (8GB) + TR004 with 4 x 16TB drives running btrfs file system, raid0 (slowly filling - 190 plots) I have a I5-11000 machine as the full node.   The good news is the  Pi5 + TR004 seems quite scalable, that is its fairly easy to add another one and once filled can switch it over to being a harvester. I'm seeing average latency on the Pi5 harvester of 400ms and max of 1.5 seconds, so it seems able to handle the random reads. While one could use a rack mount system with tons of drives I don't think the returns are enoug...

August 2024 update

I finally filled up the primary storage server with 1450 plots. My next task is to replace the couple of Pi4's that have a pair of external hard disks with the Qnap TR-004 (4 bay) storage units. To that end I have ordered a couple of Pi5 (8GB). I will start by swapping one at a time so that I have as many plots online at a time. Each of the Pi4's have around 275 plots so I should be able to double that. My concern is the TR-004 connected to a Pi5 will be slow as the Pi only has USB 3.0 (5 Gbit) ports even though the TR-004 supports USB 3.2 gen 2 (10 Gbit) connections. I guess I will find out. If it works out one could scale the solution to have multiple Pi5/TR-004 running as a harvester only requiring two power points and 1 network connection each. Update January 2025 First Pi5/TR-004 filled up with plots and the second on its way. I got 560 plots on it with 4 x 16TB drives (95.3% used). I leave some space free. The slower USB 3 port doesn't seem to effect things much. I am...

May 2024 update

As mentioned in my previous post I replaced all the drives in my primary storage server with larger ones. I am still trying to fill it up. Unfortunately the Bladebit plotter seems to lock up regularly and when I notice I have to shut down Chia, delete the temporary files off the SSD and the half-done plot that it was working on when it locked up. Top shows a zombie task and the plotter seems to have lost track of it. The 2nd WD 16TB drive that I returned under warranty has been rejected. They claimed it has a dent on the back of the drive, so likely shipping damage when I got it. I had 12 of these drives, now 11, so no point wasting any more money on the WD drives. I currently have two Qnap TR-004 units that hold 4 drives each, so 8 drives are enough. I need to fill the primary storage server before working on the TR-004's.

April 2024 update

I bought 10 x 22TB Seagate HDD. Last week I bit the bullet and removed all the 16TB HDD from the primary storage server and put the 22TB drives in. I am now plotting away trying to fill it up. The Bladebit CPU plotter seems to lock up my full-node so I have to check on it once a day. The used 16TB drives are destined to go into a couple of QNAP TR004 units running in JBOD mode plugged into a Raspberry Pi5 running as a harvester. The TR004 can hold 4 drives. If this setup works out I will look at replacing the two Pi4 + external HDD's with Pi5 + TR004 units. I might have 3 of these as it seems a fairly inexpensive way of adding another harvester with 64TB of disk space. Speaking of the 16TB drives, I returned a 2nd WD 16TB HDD and picked up a replacement under warranty for the previous drive that I returned. It had been sitting at the computer shop for almost 3 months before I drove there to pickup the replacement. Thats 2 out of 14 WD drives that have failed so far. The lack of rel...