12th of June

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 plotting machine. I am still waiting on an M.2 to U.2 adapter for the plotting machine. According to Amazon its been sent. Once it arrives I will remove the SAS controller and the 300GB SAS hard disk (its providing the work space). I should be able to start doing multiple plots at a time if the adapter works. The SAS controller will go into the Meshify 2 and connect the storage drives to it.

I am trying not to buy any large capacity hard disks as they are quite expensive. The retailers are limiting them to 4 per person at the moment. I might get some more 8TB drives later but given I only have 1.5TB used space it will be some time before I need them. The plotter also has an 8TB drive in it for storage of the plots. My next task is to setup the Meshify as a NFS server so the plotter can simply store its plots directly to it and will allow it to farm. I also need to move the plots that are on the plotter over to it.

I have seen some configurations where people put a SATA SSD into their plotting machines to store the plots temporarily when they are done and then use a script to copy them to more permanent storage, typically across a network. While I could setup a script to do that I'm not sure how to configure the farming node to look in another directory (ie you can only configure 1 directory for completed plots in the GUI).


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