Anyone using a synology NAS?

Total noob here. I’ve got an 8 bay 1518+ synology with three bays unused. I’d love to get some big hard drives, pool them together and start farming. Anyone out there done this? Maybe utilizing docker?

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One caution on NASes, you probably want to run the harvester on the NAS itself. I don’t think you’ll generally have problems with one NAS, but as you start to add more NASes, things can get really weird with harvest times. I can personally attest to that, to the tune of around 20 lost Chia coins… :sob:

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Whoa! 20 lost! That sucks! Well, I’m only using one nas so hopefully I don’t have that problem.

How did you set it up on a nas? I just received my bigger hard drives and I’m looking to set it up. Any good guides or tips would be appreciated!

Yup I’m using Synology 8 bay 1821+. I have approximately 6 8 TBs Wolfs in. 2 empty bays waiting for pool + another Synology 8 bay waiting for pool.

Connected via Cat6 cables to the router. I created 1 pool for the 6 8TBs. Running fine as it is used as farm. Plotters are 2 2TB Samsung 870 Evo Plus.

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I got 4 qnap 653d’s. They usually have good responce times but from time to time the push 5.5seconds to 6 second responce time according to info log. Still well within 30 second limit. But dry season for me for chia blocks now should have had 4 in this last 18 days now and 0 so far.

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I am using a DS1821+ with 7 x 12TB + Dual 10Gb network and it is working very well. My main computer is plotting on it and Synology is running harvester. Currently 151 plots and response time for elligible plots is between 0.1sec and 0.5sec with 80% are under 0.3sec.

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you plugged your NAS direct to your PC?

I’m using a DS2415+ here. I have 5 14TB drives in it currently. (Each configured with no RAID. BASIC).

I have a dedicated Ethernet connection from the full node to the NAS with static IPs set. (No plot transfers over this connection. Only lookups.)

This has worked will for me as I have always had sub 1 second proof checks and just won a block last night.

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No, through a 10gb switch.

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congratulations. I haven’t won any since I’ve just started plotting to 10tb.

Again congratulations and FU :laughing:

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I’m using the free space on a DS920+ that is only used for backups (active backup for business). I run the harvester on my PC (connected by 1GBs). So far I have not seen problems, but I only experiment a little with Chia farming (just 20 plots so far). I just made sure to disable all power savings/sleeping/disk spindowns etc on the NAS so it’s always ready to serve requests. Obviously during the windows that it is receiving backups things might be slower, but that is the nature of running Chia as a low priority thing on systems that are in active use.

Can you share how you are running your Synology as a harvester? I am looking to possibly run Chia in a Docker to look at the plots my plotting machine make and store to my Synology. thank you for any guidances you have on this!

I’m just running the harvester on my PC and use my Synology just for plot storage. Turned off all the power saving/sleep things on both sides and have I have not seen any problems with that setup so far.

Using docker image : GitHub - Chia-Network/chia-docker
It is not registered in the global hub linked by Synology, so you just have to download the image first:
1/ connect to ssh to your NAS
2/ download the official image by typing : " docker pull ghcr.io/chia-network/chia:latest"
3/ as soon as the image is downloaded, you can close the ssh session
After that the image will be available in the docker hub of synology
I noticed that it was not necessarry to update the image whene there is update of chia. It seems to be automatically downloaded whene the image is started : when I downloaded it was 1.1.5 and now it is 1.1.6-dev (command to check in the docker : “chia.exe version”).

I think it is better to allow the NAS to perform the harvester. Like that, I can shutdown my computer and the NAS is running by farming on the plots which are localy stored :wink:
Note that it does not consume so much CPU and RAM (even if my DS1821+ has Ryzen V1500B and 64GB RAM, a little percent of it is really used for this process and my response time when detecting at least 1 eligible plot is between 0.,1sec and 0.6sec, but usually 0,2 or 0,3 sec)

But would that not mean running a full node on the NAS? I also do not like opening my NAS to the WAN for security reasons.

Are you mounting the local Plotted drive folder somehow in the GUI? Or you able to configure the yaml file?
Do you mount a /config path to the Docker folders to store the config information?

Thank you for your help. I just want to be able to farm the plots I have plotted from my plotting computer if possible. Not looking to plot using my syno just farm the blocks. I hope I am not messing up the terminology there. I am still not 100% sure if its Harvesting or Farming that does all the intensive plotting, so I may have my terms flopped :smile:

Is it possible to just map a network drive from another PC which has some plots already on HDD?
I did try to add storage path from chia wallet but I couldn’t get it to see plots on that network drive.
I did also try to map that drive were wallet is running but still no luck.
Anyways is it possible to run farming locations from another PC drives? same network with 1gb connection.

I also join this discussion.
I’m pretty new to the real world, but I’ve been following blockchain for a while now.


I have a DS918+ with 30TB that I would like to use.
On the NAS I have now already managed the Docker and connected to my wallet.
On my PC I would like to plot and then import them to the NAS. And here is the point where I fail.


Here I have just a few questions, as far as I understand now:
1 with the Docker version there is no GUI. (more of an observation)
2 Connecting multiple machines is possible, but does it make sense to use the NAS? Most memory, but compute power maybe too small? (I personally haven’t done it yet either)

I am not using the GUI.
You can launch a shell in the docker user interface : it allow you to interact inside the docker.
I mounted the whole .chia/mainnet/ directory (containing logs, config) so that accessing directly to read and edit if necessary directly from the NAS or my computer. The sensitive part is only the private key.
Neither the famring or Harvesting is doing the intensive plotting. plotting is an ephemeral process (not a permanent service) you can call using command “chia plot” : each call will be a process which will end as soon as the plot is fully created.
I am not sure what is exactly the “farming” process, but Harvesting seems to be the part where you retrieve the challenges and try to compete to propose the best proof. To make sur it works, you need to launch the following process : full_node, farming, harvesting. Optionaly you can launch the wallet service to check your wallet status.
Feel free to correct if there is mistakes, but this is my understand and seems to work pretty well for now :slight_smile: