March 2025 update

I currently have 2597 plots spread between 4 harvesters. Due to heat I have had the Chia farm off for multiple days which doesn't help with winning blocks or for filling up the 2nd TR-004. Current storage consists of:

Main storage is a 10 x 20TB machine running ZFS file system, raidz2 (1460 plots)

Secondary storage is 7 x 8TB machine running ZFS file system, raidz1 (397 plots)

Pi5 (8GB) + TL004 with 4 x 16TB drives running bftrs file system, raid0 (560 plots)

Pi5 (8GB) + TL004 with 4 x 16TB drives running btrfs file system, raid0 (slowly filling - 190 plots)

I have a I5-11000 machine as the full node.

 

The good news is the  Pi5 + TL004 seems quite scalable, that is its fairly easy to add another one and once filled can switch it over to being a harvester. I'm seeing average latency on the Pi5 harvester of 400ms and max of 1.5 seconds, so it seems able to handle the random reads.

While one could use a rack mount system with tons of drives I don't think the returns are enough to cover the electricity costs, let along buying the hardware.

 

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