For my farming purposes, I originally bought these 5 drive terramaster devices, the F5-422. I liked that they had a 10 gigabit port and enough “muscle” to deliver that kind of throughput, and I’m glad I did, because I run them in stripes for fast population until end of the month!
Anyway, Chia is supposed to be eco-conscious so I recorded the power stats of the terramaster F5-422 as I built it up, here it is measured by my watt meter, powered on, # of drives:
Drives
Power consumption
0
11.5w
1
16w
2
20w
3
23w
4
27w
5
32w
(It uses 0.9w powered off which is not great, that’s a bit of vampire power draw but we don’t care for this use case.)
As far as live fully populated with 5 drives, formatting the array, 50w - 65w, idle after array built, 43w - 44w. Considering that amount of energy will store a LOT of Chia plots, many many terabytes, that’s where the efficiency comes in!
Let’s call it 5 × 18tb for now, Each 18tb is 165 k32 plots as I recall, so that’s 165 × 5 = 825 plots. So you can farm 825 plots for… conservatively… 50 watts / 825 = 0.06 watts per plot! If you have an even more dense storage device these numbers get better, of course. More drives, like that supermicro JBOD thing with 45 drives.
Thanks for curating and aggregating this data!! Having a central repository to reference and research has been super-helpful to my personal success as a “CHIA farmer.”
I saw from another post that your using that ‘kill-a-watt’ consumer meter. How accurate do you think that is?? I’ve been doing quite a bit of research into sustainability and going off grid. I’m thinking your most accurate measurements would be taken at the service panel. As that’s how your currently charged by your provider. Have you done any research on Tesla powerwall’s, solar, and whole house generation??
I’ve got a Sense installed at the panel to monitor my power usage and my solar generation. The automatic device identification is OK, I’ve had it for a year and it recognized most of my devices that regularly power cycle off/on (refrigerators, toasters, electric heat, etc) but it isn’t great at identifying anything that’s always on (routers, computers, smart home devices). I’ve manually power cycled some stuff just to see what the consumption is and that’s enough for me.
It’s very good for general monitoring at the panel, I can see what I’m using and what I’m producing at any given second.
