Adventures in Chia

I swapped the power supplies between the plotter and harvester. The harvester needed the extra SATA power connectors that the modular power supply had. I also installed a couple of 2TB Samsung SSD's in the harvester. The Meshify 2 case has a couple of 2.5" SSD brackets on the back of the motherboard tray. I then created a ZFS pool of the two SSD's with no redundancy, so it should have fast writes. At that point I did some testing of how long it takes to get a plot from the farmer to the harvester across the network. Test 1 10GbE network card in farmer. Dual 1GbE network card in harvester. Copying to SSD on the harvester with no redundancy (to rule ZFS out). The speed going from the farmer to the plotter was taking the same as before. Speed starts off at 240 MB/sec and drops to around 100MB/sec. Test 2 10GbE network cards in both farmer and harvester. Copying to SSD on the harvester again. The speed going from the farmer to the plotter starts around 500MB/sec and drops back...

Currently plotting away one plot at a time, using 4 threads (at least in phase 1). This is so as to not wear out the M.2 SSD so fast. I have a farmer or as Chia refers to it a "full node". I have a separate harvester machine (in a Meshify 2 case) that is basically a storage server. It has 6x WD Red 8TB drives at the moment with 60 plots taking around 5.9TiB. I have an M.2 to U.2 adapter on order, that I got on Amazon, but its not expected until next month. Must have sent it by sea.   I ordered one of these from one of my local PC shops in the hope it will turn up sooner. Its a PCIe card that you slot the U.2 drive onto it and then put the card into a PCIe x4 slot. Once this arrives I should be able to remove the M.2 SSD from the farmer and replace it with this and run multiple plots at a time. Its taking about 15 minutes to transfer a single plot from the farmer onto the harvester. I've setup a cron job to run every hour to pick up any completed plots from the local hard ...

I finally bit the bullet and decided to swap out the SAS 10k hard disk from my plotter and put a Sabrent Rocket 4 (1TB) NVMe SSD into it. While it has reasonable life expectancy I don't know how long the M.2 to U.2 adapter is going to take before it arrives. If I end up sacrificing a 1TB SSD then so be it. As expected the time to create a plot has dropped dramatically. Some timings running 1 plot at a time and allowing 4 threads: SAS 10k             Phase Secs Minutes Phase Secs Minutes 1 14213 236.88 1 14258 237.63 2 5896 98.27 2 5858 97.63 3 14040 234.00 3 15917 265.28 4 665 11.08 4 743 12.38 Total 34814 580.23     36776 612.93   1TB SSD             Phase Secs Minutes Ph...

I am up to 15 plots and my estimated time to win is 9 years. The plotter is doing one plot at a time due to limited work space. They are taking around 9 hours 45 minutes to plot. The Factal Designs Meshify 2 computer case arrived during the week along with a 500 watt power supply. I've spent today moving motherboards around. The Meshify 2 now has an Intel i3-8100T CPU, 32GB of ECC memory and six 8TB disk drives. They're plugged into the motherboard SATA at the moment. Its going to be used to store the plots. These are the HDD drive brackets. The Meshify 2 comes with six. You can get extra as a pack of two along with the screws and rubber grommets. None of the retailers seem to have any stock. I even asked Fractal Design directly but they don't have any either. They blamed the lack of stock on Chia. When in Storage mode the Meshify 2 can hold nine of these in the main section and another two in the base. The 32GB memory kit arrived yesterday and has been installed in the plo...

New version of Chia released Its 1.1.7 and according to the release notes it contains just one bug fix for an issue with sqlite3. I've updated my single node to it. Plotter issues I kept getting lock-ups when running 2 plots at a time so down-graded the memory back to 16GB and pulled out the possibly dud SAS disk. I can now run one plot at a time on the one remaining SAS disk, but at least they run to completion now. Plot time is around 12 hours. According to the status screen its going to take me 20 years to earn any Chia 😞 New Farmer parts In other news I've ordered a Fractal Design Meshify 2 computer case, along with a 500 watt power supply. I'm going to put one of my old i3 motherboards in it and use it as a storage server/farmer. I have ECC memory I can use, the SAS controller card and cables to plug into SATA drives and 7 x WD Red 8TB hard disks. None of the computer stores I use seem to have the "Universal drive brackets" that Fractal Design use, so I will...

I put the spare 16GB RAM kit I had in the machine despite it being up against the CPU cooling fan. I tried running 2 plots at a time staggered by 2 hours. I got a disk error so both plots were lost. I have kicked off another plot on its own at the moment. If you tell the machine to delete the plot it still leaves all the work files on disk. I then have to shut down the GUI and go into the work drives and delete all the files and start it up again. This would seem like a bug to me. If you tell it to delete an in-progress plot it should clean up after itself. Given all the issues I am having I can't recommend people buy second hand hard disks. They just seem to have too many problems. I have ordered an M.2 to U.2 adapter cable and will use one of my U.2 data center SSD's for work space. I've heard mention that 32GB isn't enough memory so I will probably go ahead and order another 32GB memory kit. I currently have one on order. Hopefully between the SSD and extra memory th...

I thought I would start a new blog for my adventures with Chia. I've seen loads of videos and so on before I thought I would give Chia farming a try. I had plenty of old hard disks doing nothing so I figured I may as well use them. I'm also used to computing using BOINC. I decided to build a mining rig based on the recommendations from Tom's Hardware and took their budget build idea. I had an old case with an i3-6100T that I was going to sell off, so I repurposed it. I bought an ASUS mATX motherboard, Intel i5-11400 CPU and Noctua heatsink. The case is a Fractal Designs ARC Mini which apart from taking an mATX sized motherboard also has a number of drive cages at the front. I had removed one set from it and couldn't find the drive cage but it still had 3 drive bays at the bottom and a couple of 5.25 inch bays for optical drives at the top that were now empty. It also had a modular 500 watt power supply so its an ideal case. I had a spare M.2 SSD to use as a boot drive. ...