I’m lucky enough to be in possession of a large amount of storage, so far its roughly 1000TB of 10k SAS drives, however, that will expand to 5000TB over the next month with new client installs.
My question is, how long would it take to plot 1000TB, and is there any easy way for me to figure this out myself in the future?
The only way to actually know how long it takes to plot is to try plotting with your own equipment.
That being said, there are rough guides that can tell you what might be possible, plus a multitude of user experiences within the multi-verse of hwd setups and configuration here on this form, plus guides to be found on Chi’s own sites, youtube, individual websites, commercial website, reddit, and the like.
Variables affecting plotting are many and convoluted, including your own budget, plus skill and perseverance testing and the various plotting sw available, and matching that to hw available for purchase.
Of course, one can take the easy-peasy way out and just purchase plots ready-made. However, you’ll still need to come up with an efficient farmer PC.
You can still run MM by using some sort of caching software for your temp2 folder. On Windows, that would be something like PrimoCache. If setup right, using about 85-90 GB RAM would make about 80% of those potential NVMe temp2 writes never hit that NVMe (as such, about RAM drive speed). Before upgrading my plotter to 128 GB, I run MM on 64 GB RAM box, and about 50% of writes to temp2 never hit my NVMe.
The second option is to reorganize those servers so that some will have that 128+ GB RAM, and some would have zilch. This option really depends on what kind of servers are we talking about, and OP is rather vague about it.
However, the only thing that we know is that it is a 5 PB farm, and that really doesn’t help to answer the original question (plotting time).
A moderate dedicated plotting setup will do 20TB per day. Allowing some wiggle-room for a setup that won’t start off perfect, I’d estimate 2 months to fill your first PiB.