Adventures in Chia

I added a 2nd Raspberry Pi harvester into the mix. Its the same specs as the other one, that is a Pi4 4GB with a couple of 16TB Seagate Expansion drives plugged into the USB3 ports and running btrfs. With the drives in a "single" configuration I can get around 298 plots on them. Once I have it filled I will install the Chia software and run it as a harvester. To get the drives filled I transfer the completed plots onto it as a nfs drive. Once filled I stop running the nfs server on it and its just running the harvester. This allows one to have a low-power harvester. I could use the USB2 ports as well and get 4 drives. I'm not sure if/how it would effect the performance. I could use a USB hub as well but given the Pi has two USB3 ports this will do for the moment. I don't know how many drives a single Pi could support, but it works fine with just the two drives. I have over 1000 plots at the moment and the Chia GUI is telling me I am still 2 months off winning, so it l...

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...

The replacement PCIe to U2 adapter card arrived and I tried the original Intel P4510 in it. It wouldn't work so I put another P4510 on it and after a few teething troubles its been running since. The U2 drive is used for work space when plotting. Chia released a 1.8.0 client as an urgent security update so I upgraded to it. That broke the Mad Max plotter so I was only able to use the default plotter. They have since released 1.8.1 that fixed it. One nice thing is the 1.8.0 client now tells you when a new version is available. I have been furiously plotting as fast as my one and only plotter can go. I have filled my secondary storage server (7 x 8TB drives in a ZFS raidz config) and a Raspberry Pi (2 x 16TB external drives in a BTRFS single drive config). Both of these are now harvesters. I have brought up the main storage server (10 x 16TB drives in a ZFS raidz2 config giving 106TB available) and I am working on filling it up. There is no sign of compressed plots in the 1.8.1 clien...

While waiting for a replacement parts I thought I might cover the specs of the current farm. Full node Intel core i5-11400 with 128GB of DDR4-3200 memory. 10GbE network card. Samsung 970EVO 1TB as boot drive. U2 to PCIe adapter with Intel P4510 U2 SSD (1.8TB). Storage server 1 Ryzen 5600X with 128GB of DDR4-3200 ECC memory Nvidia GT710 graphics card. 8 port SAS controller. 10GbE network card. Samsung 970EVO 1TB as boot drive. 10 x WD Red Pro 16TB SATA HDD in a ZFS raidz2 array (two drive redundancy). Storage server 2 Intel core i3-8100 with 64GB of DDR4-2666 memory. 4 port SATA card. 10GbE network card. Samsung 970EVO 1TB as boot drive. 7 x WD Red Pro 8TB SATA HDD in a ZFS raidz array (one drive redundancy). Raspberry Pi storage server Raspberry Pi4 with 4GB of memory. Micro SD card as boot drive. 2 x Seagate Expansion 16TB HDD via USB3 ports in a btrfs single drive (no redundancy). I have ordered another pair of Seagate Expansion drives in order to create a 2nd Raspberry Pi storage s...

Status Farming. We have 483 plots and estimated time to win is 4 months. U2 SSD failed I have been doing plots as fast as I can. I have filled the 2nd storage server and was in the process of filling the Raspberry Pi when the plotting/full node machine had an issue. It just locked up and so I had to force shutdown the Chia GUI and reboot. When I rebooted the machine reported various issues with the U2 SSD that I use for temporary space while plotting and went into recovery mode. Disabling the U2 SSD got the machine going again. The U2 SSD's are Intel P4510 data center (ie enterprise grade) drives. I replaced the U2 SSD with a another one. That also locked up the machine, so now I suspect the U2 to PCIe adapter card is faulty. I have ordered a replacement adapter card. The U2 SSD's were all new drives I bought a couple of years ago for a storage server that I don't run any more. Raspberry Pi Harvester I mentioned before I was experimenting with a Raspberry Pi as a harvester....

Now that I have to replot I have almost filled up one storage server (the one with 7 x 8TB drives). Using the MaxMax plotter built into the Chia GUI I can get a plot done in around 1 hour. I was hoping the Chia developers would have released support for compressed plots by now, but it looks like I will have to replot once it become available.   Adding a Pi I have added a Raspberry Pi storage server. Its a Pi4 (4GB model) with a pair of Seagate Expansion 16TB drives. At the moment I have it running NFS and am copying plots onto it as they finish. Its rather slow at copying plots due to the 1GbE network port. I am running btrfs on the hard disks in order to get the most space (defined as a single drive) out of it. It will keep copies of the metadata on both drives so it has a little bit of redundancy but I will lose the plots if either drive fails. The idea is once I have filled the drives is to remove NFS and have it run as a harvester. I had to install the full version of Raspberry...

No sync I went away for a week and powered everything off. When I got back I powered everything back up and the full node was having problems syncing. I left it for a week but it wasn't progressing at all. I rebooted it and so on and gave it another week but it refused to sync. At that point I decided to upgrade to the latest version. It didn't accept my 24 word mnemonic so I had no choice and had to start a new wallet. I started a new wallet but it refused to accept my existing plots as the keys didn't match, so I had to delete all of them. Kiss goodbye to the 22 XCH that I had. ZFS errors I have now started plotting and I am close to 200 or so plots. I was having some issues reported by my main storage server with ZFS indicating CRC and write errors. SMART stats didn't indicate the 16TB drives thought they had issues. I suspect the SAS controller was overheating as it was very hot to touch. While it has a heatsink on the card there is no fan. I disconnected a couple o...