Cost per TB inc. the associated hardware?

Actually it’s an easy calculation - just total bill / total kWh usage for the month. Looks like my last bill (during peak season) I paid exactly 0.107/kWh including all fuel surcharges, fees, taxes, etc as the “real” rate.

Electricity certainly can make a differnce and be a factor in Chia plotting’s costs, if it is less so in Chia farming as it is much less energy intensive. I have disk shelves and they run about 300w for 48TB, however as I spend very little on drives (I got one disk shelf full of drives for $250) the cost of running them is not a large part of the cost. Yes a 16TB drive on amazon might be Eur297 today but 3 of these equals the cost of 2 disk shelves/JBOD and disks contained within. They are extremely well cooled, I might even reduce the fan speed to save some kWh.

I can always gradually replace small disks in the JBODs most are 1TB, 2TB drives with larger capacity drives when I find them cheap. A 24 disk shelf could have 96TB capacity for a cost to run many times higher than the much larger capacity drives but at an initial cost of a lot, lot less.

Swings and roundabouts.

1 Like

1 TB hard drives seem like such a PIA. I personally settled on 3 TB SAS drives. I get them for around $14 CAD/TB and they are used of course, but from what I have read they are solid and will last a while. Anything smaller in my opinion just takes too much precious space.

I have a setup made from used hardware. 11 plotters and 3 harvesters + some tmp storage all around the network in other computers. At the moment 126 HHD’s total 625Tb. The cost for me has been the Nvme’s and USB drives, that is about 10000€. So 16,24€/Tb.
In my calculations I use also reselling value to estimate my total cost. In this setup it’s about 60%. So we can round up the cost to 10€/Tb.
Calculating electricity usage to this setup is PIA, but I’m working on that. :grinning_face_with_smiling_eyes:

well. My cost per TB for generating Chia is way higher than current price ~kind sad and don’t even want to calculate any more

I have not even looked at my total cost. It’s relatively small compared to others here.

Total Build Cost To Date: £1365.75
Total Capacity: 42TB
Total Cost / TB: £32.30

But, my farm is tiny. The biggest expense IMO is the NVME drive (MP600 Pro - £414.98) which I am treating as a consumable. I bought it knowing it’ll get me around 1000 plots quickly, to get some skin in the game. Everything else in my farm setup can be repurposed.

I didn’t need to buy a plotting rig since I’m using my desktop PC. Also, my Cost/TB should go down a bit because I’m trying to buy drives under £20/TB.

Disk Prices (UK)

I prefer the 16TB USB drives, they tend to have NAS or Enterprise drives in the larger capacity models, they’re usually in the sweet spot for Price/TB, keeps my farm footprint small, their cheaper than internal drives of the same capacity, and I have no qualms about shucking them later.

If I see a 16TB drive for £18/TB my wallet tends to get opened, and then I’ll buy one drive if I’m looking to expand my farm. At the end of the day, I am trying to be economical about this Chia business :nerd_face:.

The next big cost would probably be RAM, I’m looking at buying 128GB of RAM to save on long term expenses, but at £840, just for farming chia. I would need to make 2000+ plots to justify the expense. :cold_sweat:

2 Likes