Nice looking build but I do want to warn you, a lot of topics don’t highlight the importance of the SSD/NVMe correctly. They focus on manufacturer stated TBW numbers and tend to point towards high TBW drives.
While that inherently isn’t wrong it also doesn’t paint the correct picture in my opinion. TBW on itself is a good number to know but without knowing for what kind of workload this is for, it’s basically meaningless… I know that’s a bold statement, especially in this community!
It’s basically about the Write Amplification Factor (writes a drive actually does to a NAND cell to perform an action) that was used while calculating this number and generally a manufacturer doesn’t state what was used. So in practice it could be that subjecting the SSDs to a “chia” workload a 600TBW drive could actually survive longer then a 1700TBW drive in real usage without writing 200TB or so to a drive with that exact workload, we won’t actually know.
With that said, it’s still not a bad number to look at but for your build another value of the NVMe drive will be more important and that’s the sustained write capabilities of the drive. As can be seen in this graph by TomsHardware
the Seagate FireCuda 520 1TB has an SLC write cache (all TLC drives do) but then drops off to quite low levels of around 500MB/sec.
What this means in practice is that once you start to load the drive with more then let’s say 2 or maybe 3 plots in parallel performance will tank since the drive no longer has time to recover. It will try to perform your read and write requests while also managing it’s background processes but basically, grinding the whole setup to a halt. This is where plot times of “12 Hours” and such come from.
Said in a different way, a 970Evo Plus 1TB will be able to handle 3x as many plots or execute the same amount of plots (if there wouldn’t be a CPU limit) 3 times faster. With a good (non-limited) setup completing plot times under 4 hours is certainly possible, but with a few in parallel 4 to 5 hours is reasonable. The selected NVMe drives will not be able to sustain that in this case and I’m afraid that this will limit/cripple your setup more then you’d expect for the setup, having plenty of CPU and memory available.
Now I’m not saying I don’t like the drives, I actually like the Seagate brand for most stuff, and they do actually advertise their SSDs with durability and such, but performance wise I believe you will be disappointed. If part of the build is wanting to plot as fast as the hardware can handle, consider adding another pair of 1TB NVMe SSDs and running these in RAID0 with MDADM with XFS on top of them (personally tested XFS wins from EXT4 and heavily tuned ZFS). RAID0 will help with burst behavior and also you get double the cache basically. There are 15$ M2 to PCIe with heatsink little riser boards you can buy so you can easily plug in 2 extra NVMe drives. With that I believe you will be able to max out your processor and plot as fast as you can. Without, you’ll be limited to at or below half of what this processor will be capable of to get decent plotting speeds.
In the end the plots per 24Hrs is the only thing that counts, on a 5900x you should for instance be able to achieve ~50 plots per day if you tune everything right and then run into the CPU bottleneck, but you will require very high sustained NVMe/SSD performance.