Plotting grinds to a halt

Status
Farming. We have 483 plots and estimated time to win is 4 months.


U2 SSD failed
I have been doing plots as fast as I can. I have filled the 2nd storage server and was in the process of filling the Raspberry Pi when the plotting/full node machine had an issue. It just locked up and so I had to force shutdown the Chia GUI and reboot. When I rebooted the machine reported various issues with the U2 SSD that I use for temporary space while plotting and went into recovery mode.

Disabling the U2 SSD got the machine going again. The U2 SSD's are Intel P4510 data center (ie enterprise grade) drives. I replaced the U2 SSD with a another one. That also locked up the machine, so now I suspect the U2 to PCIe adapter card is faulty. I have ordered a replacement adapter card. The U2 SSD's were all new drives I bought a couple of years ago for a storage server that I don't run any more.


Raspberry Pi Harvester
I mentioned before I was experimenting with a Raspberry Pi as a harvester. At the moment I am running it as an NFS network drive with 2 x 16TB Seagate Expansion drives. I setup the two drives as a single volume using btrfs. If the drives fail I will replot as there isn't any redundancy in this configuration. I went with two drives as the Pi only has two USB 3 ports. I could use a USB hub but this is enough to test as a low-power harvester. Once I fill the hard disks I will install the Chia software, turn off NFS and run it as a harvester only. I have already done this on the 2nd storage server which is an x64 machine.

Its working out fine at the moment apart from taking a while to copy the finished plots off the full node, being limited by the 1 gigabit network port on the Pi. I had to install the full version of Raspberry Pi OS on it which uses more memory for a desktop, even though I don't have a keyboard or monitor plugged into the Pi. The Chia software won't install if you use the Lite version of Raspberry Pi OS.

I have a 2nd Pi4 4GB that I will also try the same configuration with if this works out. I have ordered another pair of 16TB Seagate Expansion drives for it.


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