Hello everyone, I’m wondering whether to switch to compressed plots, but I’ve recently started my journey with Chia, so I’m not fully prepared yet. My farm is relatively small, with 80TB, and the PC I’m using for the farm is struggling with Windows 10, so I’ll need to change the equipment for the farm. I’ve been considering a 2012 Mac Mini with an Intel i7-3615QM 2.3GHz Quad-Core and 16GB of RAM. However, I’m unsure about the level of compression I could use on such hardware. Does anyone have insights into how this would work with 80TB, and whether it’s worth going into compression with such a small farm? Best regards.
One setup I’m farming with a i7-2600 and 32gb of system ram,
Just some insight
MMX Farm info: – total size: 2269.428 TB, plots: 28450, All plots C7
.
.also farming chia uncompressed plots for now.
Hi there! I really don’t like the idea of using Mac Mini, it will be a pain down there.
What interfaces do you using to connect your drives? Sata, USB, sas?
I would recommend you to not mess with compression just farm uncompressed plots, until your farm will be 300TB+ or 400TB even better. To justify power consumption for decompression.
As platform I would recommend Zimaboard (SATA/USB) or Libreboard( if USB interface only)
Use Ubuntu Linux on them and forget about even touching it for the next couple of years LOL 
For greater expandability I would build low power PC with mini atx and sas controller on board
If you want, I could give you some bladebit compressed plots for free with different levels of compression so you could play with em
I think there is hardly any extra processing needed for low c levels so why not start with a c4 and see how it goes?
So you say I can easy farm C7 plots on this old 2012 Mac without any problem ? I thought the CPU is to small for this
I am currently using 5x 16TB ATA HDDs. I was considering SAS, but maybe for a larger farm. For now, everything is in the Orico 5-bay enclosure connected via USB. The PC hosting the farm is a Lenovo M600 with a small Celeron CPU.
Technically it’s will decompress the plot eventually but will take to much time. So you just physically unable to pass plot filter time
I haven’t tested that, we need the exact numbers to speculate on it.
I just found this one:
You think he can handle C7 plots ? 99€ is a really good price for a i5 and only 35W TDP ?
C5 max, C7 needs GPU unless you have lots of cores.
Only way to really tell is to test the hardware.
1 Like