I already had an external enclosure that will work well enough (Not @codinghorror ’s fancy one, just a 10gbps one ), so I snagged another 1tb NVME drive to plug into it and plot from my wife’s spare 2019 MacBook Air.
I’m pretty sure I’ll be able to run two plots at once on it, so should help with my overall plot output.
Now, here’s my dilemma: I have about 50tb of attached storage on my NUC, which is my main plotter and farmer. I have another 14tb external I can pop in there too.
Should I:
Setup the MacBook Air to network transfer completed plots to the storage attached to the NUC and only farm there?
Plug the 14tb drive into the Air as well, and plot until I fill it, and I guess run only a harvester on the Air on that 14tb drive?
The NUC is running Ubuntu btw, and I have gigabit Ethernet in my house if I want to setup network transfers.
Alright guys my drive arrived and no one has hopped into this thread with a suggestion so I’m bumping this bad boy. If I just run the GUI on the MacBook with the same private key on both machines, and then farm there too, I am pretty sure that will cause conflicts right?
I think I’m leaning towards plotting only on the Air and then transferring over plots over the network as they complete, but I will have some whiskey tonight and map it out further
Total noob here, but I think I’ve entered similar territory. I’ve hooked up a 1TB 970 EVO to a MacBook Pro and followed these instructions. Was up and running in about an hour. The SSD is the temp, of course, and then the plots will be transferred over to an external WD drive. My thinking was that once full, I’d move the WD drive over to my main machine, but this setup would allow the plots to be farmed until I do so.
Yeah I’m basically going to sneaker-net things actually. Since I have a 1tb drive, I can plot 1-2 at a time on the drive, while storing up to 5 finished plots. Once I hit 5, I’ll plug the drive into my nuc and transfer to the slower main externals for farming. Not at all really efficient, but will increase plots by a couple per day and I already had the MacBook so overall good in my opinion
I suggest remote harvesting on the secondary plotter… harvesting takes up very little resources for what I’ve seen on my end. Even if there’s a max 3 finished plots to harvest (assuming you just connect the SSD and not the HDD to the air) I think it is worth the coverage and lack of downtime to have them harvesting. The harvester process is very resilient to handling drives coming and going, and it’ll pick up plots as they are finished.
But also I think using the 1tb SSD and 14tb HDD on the air at once and just letting it plot and drop the finals on the HDD, while harvesting the HDD is probably the best bet. All that sneakernet is unneeded downtime, and a double whammy because it prevents plotting and harvesting.
Biggest downside of remote harvesting right now is no feedback from your farmer’s stats (eg chia farm summary) about total plot count, but if you tail the logs on both machines you can be sure you are successfully farming and harvesting. Also install chiadog.
Yeah good suggestion, I’ll tinker today and this week. So far I’m off to a disappointing start, this first plot is taking almost up to 24 hours, so I’m going to keep playing with settings before investing in automation to make sure it’s all worth it.
Thought about switching your wife’s MacBook Air for a new M1 model? Should get single plot in ~5 hours and no worries with 2 in 6hrs. Sure beats your 20+ hr issue!
I’ve got a similar setup to you. I’m using an old iMac 2012 which is plotting and farming at the same time.
I also have a 2017 MBP which is just plotting. I’m using a Samsumg 2TB NVME connected externally. It’s working pretty well getting 6 plots a day (3 and 3 about 9 hours each). I plot to a 1TB hard drive and transfer over each day to the farmer. It’s pretty manual but I’m in the office anyway so don’t mind it.
I’m using a ’ OWC Envoy Express Thunderbolt 3 Enclosure for M.2 NVMe SSD’ for the ssd. I had problems with cheaper enclosures overheating but this one is working well.
I’ve managed to tweak the settings to get 1 plot every 9 hours since it’s not amazing but it’s something. The laptop only has 8gb of ram so I’m fairly limited in what I can do with it.
In terms of migrating to an M1: I very much want to, but at this point I’ll probably just wait until the m1x or whatever they’ll call it since the current laptops have been out for a while now.
), so I snagged another 1tb NVME drive to plug into it and plot from my wife’s spare 2019 MacBook Air.