What’s your cost per TB including the associated hardware?
I’m just starting out, using a few bits I had and a few extras to make it work!
My whole setup comes out at £865.70, with a raw storage capacity of 24.3TB.
So with my current setup it equates to £35.63 a TB
After my next storage increase, another 22TB it equates to £25.44 a TB
Is this expensive?
LOL don’t get QLC drives for plotting. They are slower than HDDs.
The KPI you are looking for is how long will it take to amortize your investment. In your case it gonna be years.
Thanks for your input. I like your data backing up your claims.
If I had all the money needed to buy the best rig, I wouldn’t have what I have! So yes the SSD might not be ideal, but it’s there to be used without purchasing more kit and making the payback time even longer!
Years is better than decades!
I have like 220 TiB and 4 Weeks to win. You have 1/10 of the size, so your expected time to win is like 40 weeks. Current Chia price is 165 USD. Ceteris paribus you will get 330 USD in 40 weeks. To get your ~900 USD back, again ceteris paribus, you will need like 120 weeks aka more than 2 years.
What is your cost per TB?
Where has the 900 come from?
Current Chia price is 165 USD. Ceteris paribus you will get 330 USD in 40 weeks.
Also, that setup sounds like it uses a good amount of power. I’d estimate the D2700 with 25 HDDs to use 300W, so if my math doesn’t fail me, over 40 weeks that’s 2000 kWh. If you pay $0.10 per kWh, the electricity costs $200.
865 Pound ~ 900 USD
I do not care about this metric because I have common costs. I use my server anyways for productive tasks and earning money with other stuff. So when it has nothing to do it plots chia. Farming is 24/7. Same with my main PC. For me only SSD wear, additional electricity and HDD purchase prices are relevant. SSD wear is minimal because I use Datacenter SSDs on both PCs and on the Threadripper I plot in Ramdisk. Our cases are not comparable but yeah, my cost per TB are much lower.
Good obversation. The 25 HDDs probably use 5-6W idle and 7-8W load. Let’s use an average of 7W. That is 29 x 7 = 203 kW per hour (kWh). Per day (x 24h) that is 4872 kWh. No clue about electricity prices in the UK but in Switzerland I would pay like 1.07 USD for that per hour alone. You have 390.55 USD electricity costs a year alone from your HDDs. Unless the chia price increases dramatically or he gets free electricity, the OP is loosing money with his hardware.
The mistake he made was just to observe initial investment but not running costs. That’s why 18 TB HDDs were going for 1000 USD on ebay for a while. Big drives are just superior from a profit perspective because they consume almost the same amount of electricity as small drives.
You are really going to enjoy your ‘QVO’ ssd. I bought a 2tb for fun as it was pretty cheap and needed something. I thought it might be OK for offloading the 101GB files to allow the plotting to continue faster (than just copying to a hard drive would). I learned that it’s really just about the same as a hard drive. So no improvement, if fact it was worse as I now had to copy from it to a hard drive. It’s characteristic are… after a short burst of write capability, it settles down to a speedy 150MB/s continuous. Used as a plotting drive, that will slow your plotting something considerable…to about hard drive speed.
Fortunately Best Buy lets you return things, no questions, which of course I did. A 970 Evo plus or 980 Pro is so far above that POS ssd that it isn’t even laughable. I realize you own it already, but that’s what EBay is for… sell your mistakes.
Better even get some enterprise grade SSD but yeah, 980 Pro is a good start.
It’s a shame there are so many people out there happy to criticize.
This post was not about the setup in which I currently have. The SSD matter has been covered if you cared to read.
Electricity cost is irrelevant, a, it’s not what the post is about. B, if you haven’t got a renewable source of energy then that’s your problem.
I think you are off by 1000 here. 7Wx29 = 203W, not kW.
What do you want to hear? Congratulations, we envy you for your system that is losing money for you? Face reality, that rig is not profitable. You should sell it and buy XCH directly. The insight might hurt but it’s the best for you to face reality.
Fuck me, you re right. So it’s 203W per hour. 4872W per day which equals 4.872 kW a day. However, the estimated costs were correct because I assumed 0.22 USD per kWh. Correct me if I am wrong.
Perhaps chill a bit. No one is criticizing, rather hoping to help you by sharing experiences. Also I did read from the 1st post. I merely though you would appreciate (I guess not) some color (as in user experience) to the post that said “LOL don’t get QLC drives for plotting. They are slower than HDDs.”
Problem is that he probably is not even aware there exist differences in ssd or better NAND technology which should be accounting for depending on the usecase. QLC SSDs are ok for kids and entry gaming but nothing you wanna have in a productive environment. Best part is that we give advice and he is not appreciating it.
Yikes, now I know why you are all about the power efficiency lol! Here in the US at my location, we pay at most 0.062 USD/kWh at peak and down to 0.048 USD/kWh at non-peak!
Hah! I think you’d be surprised: Americans care about cancer too, believe it or not! 
Rates (psoklahoma.com) - the latest applicable rates are the “2019 Residential Rates.” Maybe you should move here, Oklahoma is beautiful and you get all four seasons (plus the occasional earthquakes lol)!
And actually I misspoke - the prices I gave you were both for peak usage. The off-peak season prices are even lower!!
I started with five old 1tb drives - gotta start somewhere and see if you even enjoy it!
You’re getting a lot of flak about your costs and investments and all that; just remember it is coming from people who have spent the last few months min/maxing and optimizing that stuff. Don’t worry about that too much if this is more of a hobby for now. Some people spend thousands on cars, boats, vacations, other hobbies, and those returns are near zero. So consider it a hobby, see if you like it, and learn and grow from there. You’ll naturally figure out the right balance for yourself. For example, some say get the biggest drive you can and don’t worry about cost per TB cause their electric expenses are high. Myself, I have very low electric expenses, so I use lots of small drives and I don’t pay more than $10/TB for used enterprise drives.
Have fun and ask more questions!
Thx for the link. I assume the prices there are net and without taxes as usuall in the US? But still it’s like 1/4 to 1/5 of (Western) European prices. However, what I noticed is that they have basically fees for everything. So anytime there is some service happening you pay for it. If you account for that actual electricity prices are a bit higher but still much lower compared to EU.
Oh yes, our utility companies love those fees! They do add up, but my kWh charge is still definitely the highest charge on my bill. I’ll start paying more attention to the fees and try to figure out a “real” kWh for you 