Madmax plotting - best settings suggestions?

Chia Plotting
1

It’s been a while since I’ve been plotting but picked up a few drives on the cheap.

I haven’t changed my Madmax settings from launch so any suggestions for optimum Madmax settings with my current rig?

Currently plot time is about 55 minutes which doesn’t seem great but realise CPU is ageing :frowning_face:

Ryzen 7 3700x (16 threads)
(x2) WD Blue 1TB WD NVMe M.2
DDR4 (2 x8GB) 3200mhz

Any suggestions welcome!

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2

I would help if you told us more. For example, what is you MM plotting command? How many instances at a time, what stager, if any.

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3

Thanks & apologies - didn’t think there were too many parameters/variables!

One instance. No stager.

.\chia_plot -n -1 -c (64bit contract address) -f (FARMER KEY) -t (Tmp drv 1) -2 (Tmp drv 2) -d (Destination) -r 12 -u 256

4

Well, for starters, -r 15 would help, probably quite a bit. Hopefully you’re firing off plotting from a power shell prompt, as it is cleaner and easier to do.

Set CPU affinity to the chia_plot instance(s) to 15 threads, as MM will try to take them all even though you spec lower. You could try K 2, might not help but worth trying. Also, try two instances (same parameters).

If you do do two instances (two PS prompt windows), starting a second instance after the 1st instance finished P1 will get you ~10% faster overall average plotting time on average. Guessing you’re making k32 plots, so your times should go down from what you got before.

Last, format your nvme with 64k or 128k sector size, not the default 4k.

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5

why, what is benefit?

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Here is an example ssd read/write vs block size test. Notice that xfer rate plateaus at greater than ~64kb and higher block sizes. Smaller sizes have higher overhead, hence less data. To maximize write speed, but also minimize wasting space with too large block size I choose 64k or 128k.

example ssd
example ssd702×722 25.1 KB

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