Adventures in Chia

Not much has changed since my last post. I filled the storage server some months ago and we're still harvesting. I noticed that the network space seems to have dropped a bit in recent months as the price of Chia tanks along with most other crypto. I have yet another memory upgrade on order to the storage server. The motherboard didn't recognise the memory last time so hopefully these will work. If it works it will take it to the maximum that the Ryzen 3 supports (128GB). I would then disable the two SATA SSD's that are currently log devices and turn them into cache instead. I might consider a 2nd storage server build using the same setup as before but using existing drives. I still have the original motherboard (an i3-8100). I have 4 x 8TB drives in an external USB enclosure but it gets too hot. I have 3 x 8TB drives as spares so I would get a bit more space and then can move away from using the external enclosure which is somewhat slower than having the drives plugged in d...

I filled up my storage server and the USB attached 4 bay disk enclosure. That is 1250 plots taking 123TiB, so now I am just harvesting. I could get larger capacity disks for the external enclosure but it is fairly slow and the drives run hot in there so I decide to stick with what its got (8GB drives). Another possibility would be to get a different disk enclosure. I have seen a Sabrent external disk enclosure that appeared to look like it will work well. The Sabrent uses USB 3.2 gen 2 so that should speed things up a bit. The price has fallen off a cliff recently so I don't think its viable to mine chia for a profit. I noticed that the total network space dropped from an estimated 26 EiB to 22 EiB recently so it looks like people are moving away from chia (and other crypto currencies). There are quite a lot of Etherium miners dumping their GPU's and getting out too. For the moment I am leaving it harvesting and let see what happens.

We're harvesting still. According to the Chia GUI I have 1,125 plots taking an estimated 111.36 TiB. I still have some disk space left on the storage server. Here are the current stats: NAME    SIZE  ALLOC   FREE  CKPOINT  EXPANDSZ   FRAG    CAP  DEDUP    HEALTH  ALTROOT pool1  72.8T  49.9T  22.8T        -         -     0%    68%  1.00x    ONLINE  - pool2  29.1T  26.3T  2.82T        -         -     0%    90%  1.00x    ONLINE  - pool3  72.8T  65.5T  7.25T        -         -     0%  ...

Its been hot and humid for the last 3 or 4 weeks. It was so hot on the weekend that one of the HDD in the external disk enclosure stopped working. ZFS showed the disk pool in a degraded state and the LED on the side of the enclosure was off for the drive. When I went to remove the drive I couldn't hold it as it was so hot. I left the external enclosure off for a few days. Now that its cooler I have powered it up again. All 4 drives were found and its been doing a ZFS scrub since yesterday. It should finish some time tomorrow. The enclosure has a 80 or 90mm fan in the back but doesn't seem to move much air. I will probably have to disassemble it some time and see if I can replace the fan. I am up to 939 plots taking up 92TB of disk space. I am computing some more plots at the moment and the estimated time to win is down to 2 months. I am looking for a replacement motherboard and CPU for the storage server. Currently its an mATX motherboard with an i3-8100 CPU with 64GB of memory...

I'm currently up to 825 plots taking an estimated 81.6TB of space. When it cools down a bit I will create more plots. I mentioned in my last post that I had put some larger HDD into the storage server. This week I got some extra memory for it. I tried 2 x 32GB memory sticks, the idea being to bump it to 128GB of memory, but they wouldn't work so I settled for 4 x 16GB sticks which takes it up to 64GB. Its actually 62.7GB available because the iGPU reserves memory for graphics, not that it needs it. The memory upgrade seems to have sped it up a fair bit because asking for a directory listing is noticeably faster. Previously it would do a lot of disk access which I can hear for a few seconds before displaying the directory, now its almost instant. Specs In addtion to the below I also have an external disk enclosure connected via USB 3.0. It holds 4 x 8TB WD Red  HDD. Case: Fractal Design Meshify 2 Power Supply: Seasonic 550 watt modular Motherboard: ...

I got around to installing the 16TB drives in the Chia storage server. The 4 x 8TB drives that were in the storage server were swapped out. I had 3 pools originally as: pool1 - 5 x 16TB drives in raidz pool2 - 4 x 8TB drives in raidz pool3 - 4 x 8TB drives in raidz It took about 3 days to move the files off pool3 onto another server and then copy them back. I also spent a day moving a lot of files to pool3 to free up space on pool1. This is what we have now: pool1 - 5 x 16TB drives in raidz pool2 - 4 x 8TB drives in raidz pool3 - 5 x 16TB drives in raidz NAME    SIZE  ALLOC   FREE  CKPOINT  EXPANDSZ   FRAG    CAP  DEDUP    HEALTH  ALTROOT pool1  72.8T  5.38T  67.4T        -         -     0%     7%  1.00x    ONLINE  - pool2  29.1T  26.3T...

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 ...