Plotting resumes

After filling up the disk space on the home made storage server there have been a couple of developments.

External disk enclosure
The external disk enclosure arrived. I have put the two spare 8TB HDD into the enclosure and spent a bit of time testing it. It presents the disks as individual drives, which is what I wanted. I am currently running them as a ZFS mirror. I had an issue where the drives spin down if you don't keep them busy. Trying to set the spin down time doesn't work. Fortunately Chia keeps checking the plots so that solves the issue as its checking every 10 seconds or so.

I am now moving plots from the internal drives in the storage machine to the external enclosure. Its getting around 120MB/sec. While that is going I have started creating more plots.

More drives on way
I managed to get a good deal on new WD Red Pro 16TB drives, so I bought 5 of them. This changes my original plan. Now the plan is to swap out the 8TB drives that are in the storage server and put the 5 x 16TB drives in it. I will use a raidz1 (single drive redundancy) pool. That should double the space available for plots and free up the 8TB drives.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

22nd of June

Image
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
Read more

More harvesting

I have 750 plots at the moment taking up 74TiB according to the the chia software. Storage server I purchased a pair of 32GB ECC memory modules to update the storage server. The machine wouldn't boot with them so I went back to using the pair of 16GB memory modules it had before. I purchased some more 16TB hard disks with a view to replacing the 8TB drives that are in the storage server. I am running ZFS and have 3 pools of drives: 5 x 16TB drives in Raidz (approx 32TB usable) 4 x 8TB drives in Raidz in an external enclosure (approx 24TB) 4 x 8TB drives (approx 24TB) The plan is to make a Raidz2 (two drive redundancy) of 10 x 16TB drives. This should yield approx 128TB usable space. The pool in the external enclosure can remain as is. I might upgrade it to larger drives at some point but don't have any plans at the moment. Due to the USB interface they are almost twice as slow as the drives inside the storage server, even though they are the same make and model 8TB drives. The
Read more

That took a while

I had to copy the plots off the 8TB disks so I could swap them out of the storage machine (aka harvester). That took 2 days, even with a 10GbE network connection between the two storage servers. I then removed the 8TB drives, put the 5 x 16TB drives in and copied the plots back. That took another 2 days with it doing 240MB/sec for most of that, which would mean the storage server simply can't write the data any quicker. After that I fired up the full node which told me 121 out of the 252 plots couldn't be opened. I ended up deleting them and I will have to plot fresh ones. Clearly they didn't survive being copied. It probably would have been quicker to upgrade the disks in the storage server and re-plot everything. At the moment I have put 4 of the 8TB drives into the external disk enclosure and I'm copying some of the remaining plots over to it. I ended up setting up a cron task to run every 10 minutes to write a small file to the disk enclosure in order to prevent the
Read more