I’m using an almost identical setup, with a slightly different Orico enclosure. I’m using a Sabrent Rocket 2tb inside it.
I’m still trying to figure out the best setup, I’m easily getting 12 to 13 plots per 24 hours. Hoping to get that up slightly by using plotman and keeping things automated.
Some things I’ve run into that are slowing me down:
- Occasional crash
- 16tb WD drive self-ejecting during final copy from SSD (power issue?)
It is important to install python3 via “universal” installer and check that your python processes are “Apple” and not “Intel” in Activity monitor
A bunch of folks on Reddit are running them on ARM native and getting 4 plots every 10 hours
This is a bit of an understatement. If I kick off 5 plots in parallel without staggering, they are done in 6.3 hours. If I do 3 x at once, they are done in 5.10hr, and 2x at once about 4hr. Staggering should even out resource usage and avoid plots finishing at the same time which means that the SSD → HDD copy becomes VERY slow because each process is trying to write to the HDD at the same time, leading to thrashing.
Keep in mind that macOS tends to start to swap from ram pretty quickly, which can mean with plotting it’ll be doing a lot of read/writes off the internal SSD. This could be a factor if you intend to resell the Minis when plotting becomes less desirable (your plan doesn’t include very much HDD space so not sure what your long term goals are). Part of this is that M1 macs appear to suffer from excessive wear in general. To hedge against this I installed Big Sur onto a spare 1tb NVME in a usb 3.0 (not thunderbolt) enclosure and have been using that. My thinking is that should mean any swap files land on that SSD instead of the permanent internal one. I have no idea if this reasonable or not. Aside from slightly slower boot times the system is smooth.
I’m using my mini in headless configuration, so I disabled filevault and turned on autologin. The ScreenSharing demon seems to bug out a lot so I’ve enabled SSH so I can restart it. this seems to be a longstanding issue but I’ve never relied on headless configuration before so new to me.
Final thought is that i’m running a remote harvester on the Mini. My main Farmer/Full-Node is a Raspberry Pi 4b, but I don’t wan’t the plots on the HDD on the mini to go to waste, so the mini is harvesting them. When the drive is full I’ll move it to the Pi with my other full plot HDDs (I have a Sabrent powered USB hub) and put connect a new empty HDD to the mini.
I’ve been plotting and farming for about 10 days, and the entire time “Expected time to win” has been 9 days as netspace is scaling as fast as I am, which is a bit disheartening. At this point I think I’ll stop at 5 HDDs (10tb - 16tb) partly because I’m looking at the price of them go way up and partly because my goal from the start was to establish a handful of full drives and let it farm in peace.
Happy to answer any questions you may have.