Adventures in Chia

I have 750 plots at the moment taking up 74TiB according to the the chia software. Storage server I purchased a pair of 32GB ECC memory modules to update the storage server. The machine wouldn't boot with them so I went back to using the pair of 16GB memory modules it had before. I purchased some more 16TB hard disks with a view to replacing the 8TB drives that are in the storage server. I am running ZFS and have 3 pools of drives: 5 x 16TB drives in Raidz (approx 32TB usable) 4 x 8TB drives in Raidz in an external enclosure (approx 24TB) 4 x 8TB drives (approx 24TB) The plan is to make a Raidz2 (two drive redundancy) of 10 x 16TB drives. This should yield approx 128TB usable space. The pool in the external enclosure can remain as is. I might upgrade it to larger drives at some point but don't have any plans at the moment. Due to the USB interface they are almost twice as slow as the drives inside the storage server, even though they are the same make and model 8TB drives. The ...

I have 650 plots which are harvesting. Once I sort out storage I'll resume plotting. The 4 x 16TB drives arrived. I could just swap out the 8TB drives that make up pool3 but its best to have an odd number of drives in raidz or raidz3 and an even number for raidz2. I will order another pair of 16TB drives and some SATA power extension cables. The power cables have to come off the power supply which is at the bottom rear of the case, reach to the front and up towards the top. They are just a bit too short to reach the top couple of drive mounts. There have been a few updates to the chia software. As of writing this its up to version 1.2.9. It looks like they are planning on some changes to the wallets as the change logs refer to "a future release".

I've got 600 plots and have stopped generating any more for the moment, so its just harvesting what I have. I ordered some more 16TB drives for the storage server. Currently I have 3 pools of disks in/attached to it: NAME    SIZE  ALLOC   FREE  CKPOINT  EXPANDSZ   FRAG    CAP  DEDUP    HEALTH  ALTROOT pool1  72.8T  26.6T  46.1T        -         -     0%    36%  1.00x    ONLINE  - pool2  29.1T  26.3T  2.82T        -         -     0%    90%  1.00x    ONLINE  - pool3  29.1T  26.2T  2.96T        -         -  ...

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...

Still creating plots, at least until I fill up the current storage pool. I have a total of 455 plots taking 45TiB (according to the Chia GUI). Estimated time to win is 6 months. I have two pools of disks, both running under ZFS with raidz (single disk redundancy). The first pool is 5 x 16TB internal to the storage machine, giving approximately 64TB usable space. The second pool is 4 x 8TB in the external disk enclosure, giving approximately 24TB usable space. I've filled the second pool to 90% (or 93% depending on what utility one uses) and now I'm filling the first pool. Its currently 45% full. I am still waiting on drive mounting brackets for the storage machine, the delivery date keeps getting pushed further back. Once they arrive I may try and mount the 8TB drives into the storage machine as its faster than the external enclosure, as well as allowing me to put another 8TB drive in. I would then look at my collection of older drives to go into the external enclosure, althoug...

I've copied 186 plots onto the external disk enclosure. They are taking up 19TB. It does about 110MB/sec when copying files so its taken a few days to get them across. I now have a total of 274 plots taking 27.122TiB, which is more than I had before losing a bunch of them. Some are on the internal 16TB drives and 186 are on the external disk enclosure. Both sets of drives are running a ZFS raidz pool (each). It turns out there was a bug in the Chia software marking plots as corrupt. You can't move them while its running. I have had to shut down Chia, move a bunch of plots and then start Chia again. I am now on a quest to fill up the 16TB disks. I still haven't received any block rewards and current estimate to win is 9 months. Chia software is now up to version 1.2.3.

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...