22nd of June

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 disk and put them onto the harvester. In order to speed this up I have a 10GbE network card on order for the harvester. Its currently got a dual port 1GbE network card which I will swap out.

I have also ordered a pair of 2TB SATA SSD's to use as fast storage in the harvester. This (and the 10GbE network card) should allow fast file copies. Plots can then be moved from the SSD's at their leisure onto the slower hard disks. I can only use SATA as the two PCIe x16 slots on its motherboard are occupied. One has a SAS controller connected to the hard disks and the other has the dual port network card. It still has a couple of PCIe x1 slots but there isn't much one can plug into them.

We had a power outage for about 10 minutes yesterday. I know there was supposed to be an electrician looking at the complex lights which keep tripping a circuit breaker. I suspect they turned off the power to the whole block. I am now looking at getting a UPS for the harvester. It doesn't appear to have been damaged but I probably should get one to allow it to shutdown gracefully. Fortunately I'm using ZFS with two drive redundancy on the harvester so files on it should be safe. The farmer lost the plot that was in progress as well as all the queued ones.

 

Update: 23 June

A few SATA SSD's arrived yesterday. A 1TB SATA SSD has been installed in the farmer and the 8TB HDD that was in there has been removed.

The U.2 to PCIe card and 10GbE network card arrived today. I've put a U.2 drive on the adapter card and installed it already. The sacrificial M.2 has been removed. The plotter is now running its first set of parallel plots using the U.2 SSD.

That should be about it for changes to the plotter, apart from the power supply. It has a modular 500w PSU. The harvester has a semi-modular 500w PSU but its only got two SATA power cables. I need to swap the PSU's around as the harvester needs lots of SATA power connectors for the hard disks.