Hard drive filesystem for farming

Chia Farming & Harvesting
1

I will use and SSD for plotting and I do not need a very fast hard drive for farming.

I’m farming in separate hard drives, no RAID. Each one is connected individually to the farming machine.
My farmer is a Linux machine with external HD attached.

I finally bought a big one 18 TB and I would like to make sure I’m using the right filesystem for it.
Should I simply use ext4 and remove the disk-space reserved for root (Remove reserved disk-space for root on ext4 | jima) or should I use another filesystem. If so, which one and why?

Thanks in advanced

2

You can also specify largefile4 for a few extra bytes space

3

ext4 is fine for everything, including farming. You are right to dial down the reserved space. Also, folklore says xfs is known to also be a good file system for farming, but there will likely be no practical difference on an 18TB drive.

4

Once the drive is fully plotted, do we need journaling to be enabled?

5

For Linux, have a look at PlotFS. It doesn’t have the overhead of a typical file system and uses every byte of free drive space.

6

Hi, thanks for the suggestion.

It may be the more efficient one, but I do not want to use a custom filesystem, since it might not be supported in the future and it might not get/have security fixes if some happen to exist in the current version.

7

Thank you all.

I decided to go with the following configuration:

sudo mkfs.ext4 -m 0 -T largefile4 -L farm-004 /dev/sda1

Result

BEFORE

df -h
/dev/sda1        17T   24K   16T   1% /farm-004

AFTER
df -h
/dev/sda1        17T   24K   17T   1% /farm-004

df
/dev/sda1      17574921948        24 17574905540   1% /farm-004

inodes

1	sudo mkfs.ext4 -m 0 -F -L farm-004 /dev/sda1
2	sudo mkfs.ext4 -m 0 -F -T largefile -L farm-004 /dev/sda1
3	sudo mkfs.ext4 -m 0 -F -T largefile4 -L farm-004 /dev/sda1

df -i
Filesystem       Inodes   IUsed    IFree IUse% Mounted on
/dev/sda1      274661376      11 274661365    1% /farm-004
/dev/sda1       17166336      11  17166325    1% /farm-004
/dev/sda1        4291584      11   4291573    1% /farm-004

The number of plots it will hold can be found on this reddit thread: https://www.reddit.com/r/chia/comments/s3zspr/how_many_k32_plots_fit_on_an_18tb/

2 Likes
8

You’re concerns are legitimate and understandable… I audited the code myself (and submitted a PR). It’s a very basic user-space filesystem for linux. In fact, it may be more secure than typical file system since it does not implement all common FS functions (i.e. move, rename, timestamps, etc).

I am convinced it’s stable and secure, for now at least.

Consider another scenario… I have 27 5TB USB drives from last spring. Each one, formatted with xfs, (I would use xfs over ext4, its more efficient storage-wise) after being filled with plots, leaves behind about 98GB of unusable space. That is 2.5TB of wasted space, enough for about 24 more plots. Sure, there are tricks with loopback files and stuff than can be done to reclaim it, or one can use a special filesystem like PlotFS or UnionFS to maximize the utilization of space, without the inherent risk of total data loss that a single drive failure could cause using LVM.