Since @SlothtechTV may be to humble to promote his own content, I’ll do it for him!!
As someone who’s built over 16 plotters for myself and clients since a month before mainnet launch, this content is bang on
Such a creative approach and well documented!! Thanks Alex
Haha that not budget. But it’s the cheapest you’ll get for a desktop with NVMEs.
I do 38 plots a day for £600 and no exploding nvme are used. Yes I got the ram for free for work but pretty sure extra £60 would cover that.
R720xd dell server flashed with it mode and 24 x 2.5” 10k HD. Server was £350 and drives about £270 with caddies but you have to hunt for cheap drives. I got a job lot for £150 in an auction and caddies we’re extra £5 each.
Sorry, but I don’t think your n=1 situation makes the proposed built by Alex not a budget solution.
His point is that you don’t need to buy the latest CPU with the highest specs and most cores to have a decent output.
Yeah his build is cheap but you can do cheaper that is my point.
Plotting using a ram drive would make killing SSDs much less likely. What would be faster ramdrive plotting 1x K32 plot at a time using 4? cores, or plotting 8-10x (2 cores each) plots at a time using spinning disks as temp drives. I couldn’t justify killing SSDs to do this. Especially as the kit I’m waiting on is all second life servers and HDDs.
Ramdisk is very fast, but plotting speed is also greatly determined by cpu single core performance, so if you use and older xeon it won’t be that fast no matter how fast your ramdisk is.
So my bet would be to do as many plots at a time, for highest daily output
A single plot is not IO bound most of the time, not even when you have a lowly SATA SSD. So the 290 GB ram disk you would need per plot might not speed up things as much as you hope.
So it won’t be faster necessarily but it wouldn’t die after 1000 writes. However if you’ve got 12 cores and 12 hardrives I guess plotting 6 plots at a time with plenty of ram allocated to each plot makes more sense?
It all comes down to cost, and how much of a premium you are willing to pay for reduced plot times.
another option is just plotting on harddisks, they don’t really suffer from writing that much.
1 plots per hdd, runs slow but not crazy slow.
Agreed. I’ve got two servers coming, one has lots of ram but slower processors. So I think I’ll try ram drive plotting on the machine with slower processor speed. How many threads is fastest per plot? Then set the other machine to parallel, staggered plotting to multiple spinning disks.