August 2024 update

I finally filled up the primary storage server with 1450 plots.

My next task is to replace the couple of Pi4's that have a pair of external hard disks with the Qnap TR-004 (4 bay) storage units. To that end I have ordered a couple of Pi5 (8GB). I will start by swapping one at a time so that I have as many plots online at a time. Each of the Pi4's have around 275 plots so I should be able to double that.

My concern is the TR-004 connected to a Pi5 will be slow as the Pi only has USB 3.0 (5 Gbit) ports even though the TR-004 supports USB 3.2 gen 2 (10 Gbit) connections. I guess I will find out. If it works out one could scale the solution to have multiple Pi5/TR-004 running as a harvester only requiring two power points and 1 network connection each.


Update January 2025

First Pi5/TR-004 filled up with plots and the second on its way. I got 560 plots on it with 4 x 16TB drives (95.3% used). I leave some space free. The slower USB 3 port doesn't seem to effect things much. I am running btrfs on them in a raid 0 array. Yes I know no redundancy but should allow reads from all 4 drives at the same time.

There is now a 16GB Pi5 available so I could upgrade to it but don't think the additional memory is going to make much difference as it would only be used for disk cache.


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