I have been lurking here for a week, it has been helping me expand my skills with chia a huge amount, thanks to everyone on here, there is a plethora of resources for people starting out in chia farming.
One thing I have focused on is increasing what I have with as minimal cost as possible, used parts where possible, hopefully should help the struggle.
I found a nice dual CPU Xeon HP model running Windows 10 pro, thanks to this forum I’ve expanded my PowerShell ability, from none to some. I will be putting some M.2 drives in for faster plotting.
I have seen how expensive HDD are and am lurking every used site I can find here in OZ to get some scores.
What I want to know though, what is some of your guys best jerry-rigged storage expansion?
I am setting up an LSI 9211-8i that supports 8 SATA outputs. That should get me enough storage for the short term to get me going.
One thing that I am curious of, how big can you go from a windows setup mass storage wise, what would my limit be?
I’ve got 22 HDDs plus a few SSDs attached to a single motherboard and should be able to get up to 60 drives attached. I’m using 2 PCI-e 4x SATA 6 Port cards. Each port can connect to a SATA 1-to-5 port multiplier (I already have 4 of these connected for 20+ drives). Here’s more info: Show off your rigs! - #98 by enderTown
A HP P812 SAS Controller with 16 external and 8 internal SAS ports is also a quite affordable option. I got mine for 15 € used (that’s a usual price for that adapter).
Cables to connect 4x SATA/SAS drives to the external ports are about 15$ on AliExpress and you can get up to 2 meters. That’s actually a pretty solid cable intended to be used outside of the case uike a SATA cable.
Drawbacks:
Putting it in HBA mode requires a patched Linux kernel and the external ports only work with an older firmware version and it is really HUGE.
You can get some pretty good deals on ex data centre drives. And SAS expanders/disk shelves to hold them in. They are kept cool, they spin up in sequence and not all at once.
It’s true some of these drives have a lot of hours on them, but they’re enterprise drives and have been run cooled properly. Plus losing a drive full of plots costs a few $ but its data you can replace.
That’s one of the best parts of Chia: the fact that plots are disposable. It’s a great project to send old drives to die: no parity or anything just run them until they go offline…