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.

 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

May 2024 update

As mentioned in my previous post I replaced all the drives in my primary storage server with larger ones. I am still trying to fill it up. Unfortunately the Bladebit plotter seems to lock up regularly and when I notice I have to shut down Chia, delete the temporary files off the SSD and the half-done plot that it was working on when it locked up. Top shows a zombie task and the plotter seems to have lost track of it. The 2nd WD 16TB drive that I returned under warranty has been rejected. They claimed it has a dent on the back of the drive, so likely shipping damage when I got it. I had 12 of these drives, now 11, so no point wasting any more money on the WD drives. I currently have two Qnap TR-004 units that hold 4 drives each, so 8 drives are enough. I need to fill the primary storage server before working on the TR-004's.
Read more

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...
Read more

Lots of disk issues

The main storage server I built which has 10 x WD Red 16TB drives is having disk issues. I had one spare drive I purchased at the time. After getting a bunch of disk errors recently I bought 3 more drives as spares. The first spare I put in refused to spin up. The second drive (brand new out of its anti-static bag) was giving lots of write errors. I'm now using the 3rd spare to replace one of the original disks that reported tons of errors. I can hear disks retrying but because they are so close to each other can't tell which one from the noise. The drives state on the packaging they have a 5 year warranty so I will be sending some back. Recently WD are in the media with people reporting that WD drives have been giving warnings for drives that are older than 3 years (26,280 hours) and need to be replaced.  My original drives have run hours in the 11,000 range. If a drive is working fine there is no reason to replace it based simply on its age. I will look at mixing the drive br...
Read more