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 drives spinning down. I'm thinking about getting a second disk enclosure and put the remaining drives in it.

Once the copies are done I will fire up the plotter and get it going on new plots to fill up all these disks.

Oh and there is a new version of the Chia software out. Version 1.2.2 for all platforms. It seems to be bug fixes.


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 plotting

I'm still producing plots as I have free disk space. While that is ongoing I have rounded up all my old hard disks. I have repurposed one of my old machines and have it running Darricks Boot and Nuke (DBAN) to wipe the hard disks. I started with the 320GB drives and they're taking around 6 hours to wipe. They were made in 2007 and 2008. I'll be dropping these drives off at an ewaste (electronic waste) facility so they can be recycled. I'll be getting rid of all the 3.5" drives that are less than 4TB. I am still waiting on the drive brackets for the storage server. They were supposed to be in this week but have been delayed again. I saw the QNAP TL-R1200C-RP 12 bay 2U rack mount JBOD for sale. What is unusual about this is most rack mount JBOD's use SAS which means you need a HBA card with external SAS ports in your PC, but this one uses USB 3.2 to connect. The new network switch was supposed to be available "mid-August". The computer shop don't kn...
Read more

Storage server upgrade part 1

The first part of the upgrade was to the existing storage server. The existing server is in a Meshify 2 case and has 10 x 16TB HDD drives and a couple of SATA SSD's to use as log devices. The change was to bump the memory up to the maximum it supports (128GB). I tried around a year ago however the memory I got didn't work and the computer wouldn't even POST. This time using different memory modules it worked. While I was at it I disabled the log devices and removed the 2TB SATA SSD's. The log device is only used for writes. Seeing as the disks are full I don't write anything to the drives so there is no point in having a log device. I put a single 1TB SATA SSD in their place to use as a cache drive. I let the system run for a day so I could get some stats on how it was being used. It had a zero hit rate so I decided to disable it. On the subject of stats I seem to be getting around 75% hit rate on the memory cache (or ARC as its called under ZFS). A cache drive (or ...
Read more