Humming along

After sorting out the network issues things are now humming along. I need to get another 10GbE network switch so I can connect some of my other devices but at the moment the farmer and plotter are on 10GbE so moving plots only takes 3 minutes. The plotter is churning out plots and I have used over 50% of the disk space in the farmer. Current stats:

175 plots

17.322 TiB space used

Estimated time to win is "a year" (based upon current Chia total netspace).

I have two spare 8TB disks that I could put into the farmer but I am waiting for additional drive brackets which aren't due until August. The Meshify 2 case only had 6 drive brackets and I have used all of them. After getting the extra drives into the machine I need to rebuild the ZFS disk pool so I would have to move the plots somewhere else, delete the pool, create a new pool of 8 drives and copy the plots back. 

I have decided not to spend any money on buying hard disks. All the disks I have used so far I already had. 18TB hard drives cost $1,100 (AUD) at the moment. The 8TB ones are a lot cheap at $400 each but its better to have fewer large capacity disks than using lots of small ones. Given I haven't won any Chia I don't see the point in spending more money on it.

 

Plotter parts list

Motherboard ASUS Z590M-Plus
CPU Intel i5-11400
Cooler Noctua NH-U9S
Memory 32GB DDR4-3200 (2x16GB)
PSU Seasonic 500 semi-modular
Case Fractal Design ARC Mini
Boot drive Samsung 970EVO 1TB M.2 NVMe SSD
Work drive Intel DC4510 1.8TB U.2 SSD
Holding drive Samsung 870EVO 1TB SATA SSD
Network card ASUS XG-C100C (10GbE)
Additional card Silverstone PCIe to U.2 adapter


You can see I have 3 SSD's in the plotter. The first is a boot drive, the second is an Intel data center U.2 drive, that I had to purchase the adapter card for, and finally a 1TB SATA SSD to store completed plots on.

It takes some time to save the complete plot from the U.2 drive so I used a SATA SSD as a holding drive as its faster than a hard disk. I have a cron job running every hour to move the plots from the holding drive to the farmer. I could have saved the completed plots directly onto the farmer but if there are any network issues you lose the plot and then run out of work space.

 

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