i have 3 pc with win10 running(plotting)
all 3 with samsung 980 + ryzen 7 3800x 32gb ram
as said, they’re built for plotting, now i have some 8t hard disk nearly full and im thinking of move em to a new pc for farming only ( more energy efficiency and less costly)
so all im gonna do is pull the hdd out and incert it into the farming one? will the system (chia app) recognize it? I’ve never done(tried) it before and im really clueless… and im really afraid of data loss or errors…
so im here looking for an answer ( recommendation) for how to do it properly.
Well, you should turn off the PCs first* then yes, you can just plug the drives into another PC.
You will have to tell the Chia app on the new computer to search your drives for plots. On the Plots tab, click the three dots next to the Add A Plot button, then Add Plot Directory.
*: (you can configure them to let you remove internal disks while the PC is running, just like flash drives, but you probably don’t want to experiment with this and you might have to reboot to turn that function on anyway)
I need something like that
One pc is with windows where I am plotting and the final destination is on external usb.
On other pc with ubuntu, where I want to farm, I have an other externa usb with 10tb.
If I connect here the first external usb and I move all the plots in the other externa usb than I Add new plots on chia It is correct?
What Need to do on the first computer? whats up when it will not see anymore the plots in the directory?
It should be fine - i use a mix of network transfer and sneakernet. My plotters generate too many plots to transfer over to the main farmer using the single gigabit connection (I am considering multiple connections or 10GB - but i digress)
All running Linux:
Plotters have a local disk cache for 2-8 HDD(each 2-3TB SAS) - they plot to SSD which are then transferred to local HDD
I mostly transfer files to the farmer using the rsync command with bandwidth limiting - it can’t keep up with plot generation but slows the filling of local cache HDD
Every 5-7 days I hot pull a block of 4-8xHDD out of the plotter and physically walk it to the farmer, hot plug in, mount disks and add plots
I am using 3TB SAS hard drives which support hot plugging so it works ok - USB should also but i doubt it will work so well with SATA
So its technically non-stop barring power loss, windows updates, software updates or my fat fingers
There are no problems i know of with using a few 10TB USB as far as i can see, though some others have had problems with larger numbers of such devices. I don’t have any experience so i can’t say but it looks like they would simplify a setup involving a few disks only
I only use SSD for the temporary files, which the plotter automatically copies from SSD to HDD. The reason i then move them to my main farm is simply because the plotters only support 8 drives and my store is predominantly 3TB SAS drives (so 216 plots) - the main farm uses SAS expenders so can support (in theory) up to 64 or so drives
I have plotters with a handful of drives, migrating plots to the larger farm in the background. I run 1 full node/farmer on the farmer node and that includes all its local disks + the plotter drives (over Samba - a network share)
Finally I disconnected the extarnal usb from the wirndows pc and I moved the plots on ubuntu copying them on other external usb.
Now on the computer windows where they were connected I saw them still in the farm? Is is normal or strange?
thank you
If you plotted with the farmer/pool key and it knows the directory (via GUI or cli) it should just work. If you didn’t plot with the farmer/pool key you can import the keys on the machine you generated with, which is probably fine if they’re all your machines and you treat them all with the same level of paranoia
then yes, you can just plug the drives into another PC.
