Thanks my man.
You are spot on that I’m going to get here eventually - my plan was to fill this chassis ~80TB and then get an external USB 3.2 enclosure to start filling. I don’t want to sacrifice all the unused space/capacity 
I think you are right this is the inevitable place for me to land - I just didn’t want to get there yet with all this unused capacity. This is primarily a mental preference - not a technical one.
You are spot on - I’m just being fussy 
You aren’t kidding! Man, lesson learned there.
Really appreciate the support - I think I have the solve and I’ll make a post here at the end after the replies with what I did.
OH - I didn’t actually know this thank you for the tip!
It’s up to you - I think the PCIe 3.0 performance is 3500 MB/sec cap? Each of those 980 pros can do 7,000 MB/sec reads (I forgot write specs) so if you double them up into a RAID 0 array, you are missing out on a lot of additional speed by sticking it in a PCIe 3.0 setup.
Personally I would spring for the 4.0 setup.
IMPORTANT - I was looking at the Gigabyte Z590 Vision G last night when I was trying to learn my way through my blockaide here… IIRC there is only 1x M.2 slot that runs at that speed - so if you want to RAID multiple SSDs, you need to look at a standalone card like the ASUS Hyber m.2 PCIe 4.0 (Gen 4 it’s called) - it will go into the PCIe 4.0 slot.
FOLLOWUP to my Last Update (link)
After being super depressed last night that things weren’t going to get online and feeling like I really need to get this setup done the way I want it to run, I made the two following changes this morning.
Net additional outlay: ~$200 ($120 for Hyper card and +$60 more for CPU)
So the only PIA is that I need to pull and clean and return the CPU to Newegg - other than that, the rest of the hardware is staying.
Once I get the new hardware and confirm it works as desired (with NO disabled SATA ports) I’ll update the build manifesto in this running thread to help anyone.
Bonus Research Findings
You know how this goes - you are reading through links and specs for hours and inevitably run across a number of interesting things… 2 items that really stood out to me last night:
Thank for your thoughts! Yes, best would be to check for a motherboard that supports 2X M.2 PCIe 4.0 x4 slots.
If I checked correctly on the Gigabyte website for the Gigabyte Z590 Vision G it says this:
Sorry to hear about the troubles with your CPU/mobo pairing. With how quickly you’ll be plotting, I think you’ll quickly outgrow the native SATA on your motherboard regardless of which route you take so I wouldn’t stress too much about that. Jumping up to 11th gen to get PCI 4 makes sense to me, and I am increasingly jealous of the ASUS Hyper card crew on this forum…
Looking forward to seeing what this rig does for you once you have the last few wrinkles sorted out!
Scroll down and BE SURE you read about what that asterisk means - but FWIW the gigabyte boards I researched DID NOT seem to share and supported more input connections than ASUS, ASRock and MSI - they looked really solid.
Thanks my man - so far I’ve been pretty chill about what to expect - but once it’s up and running if it’s sitting at like 15% utilization I might turn into “super crazy script-optimization guy” in which case… I’ll document all of that also so it can help others 
This thread is pure gold, im learning so much.
Im still confused by the stagger-optimization settings (appricate any ideas regarding settings for 11700K or 10850K)
… and now since i learned about a 3rd factor sustained writing performance - im worried that this is my bottleneck with the 2x Patriot Viper VPN100 2TB M.2 SSD i got…
So from my understanding - Samsung 970 PRO 1TB is the #1 - and Samsung 970 EVO Plus is 2nd choice in sustained writing performance?
Agreed!
Hmm, I almost got those same drives because of the superior TBW rating, but now that I checked the Tom’s review (link) I see what you mean…
To your question, yes from this test it appears the 970 is one of the favorites out there - I picked up 2x 980’s so lets hope those do OK once I get this build running (waiting on CPU and ASUS Hyper card).
I have 2x 980 Pro 1TB in R0 and they perform very nicely, no worries there, it’s basically the best TLC based SSD you can get. I also believe they’ll do at least 2000TB of Chia writes.
It’s funny trying to read the original post but the txt edit changes in real-time!
Are the numbers on the Firecuda 520 2TB just as bad as the 1TB? If so, yikes, this would be my bottleneck on my build (see here: Here's my rig - What settings to use? - #3 by KoalaBlast)
I want to run 4x 2TB NVME on hyper V card with my 5950x and 128GB RAM. Which do you recommend? Not sure I can return these, but they may be the bottleneck and worth upgrading.
Would 4x 1TB 970 be better than 4x 2TB 980? 970 sustain writes at 2.7GBPs and the 980 at 2.2GBPS, but the 970 doesn’t come in a 2TB variant.
Yeah the firecuda really gets very slow once you burn through the SLC cache, the 2TB will have more cache, but it won’t matter for Chia, burns right through it.
For consumer drives the 970Pro 1TB or the 980Pro 1TB are great choices in my opinion. With that 5950x you’ll probably want to do about 12 to 14 parallel threads and if you have a “Hyper V” card coming, I presume that’s one of those x16 cards with 4x M2 through PCIe bifurcation? Then I’d go with either 4x the 970Pro 1TB or the 980Pro 1TB and storage speeds will no longer be you’re bottleneck.
Also don’t need 128GB of RAM, I run 12 threads just fine with 32GB, 64GB might give you 14 threads but the CPU can’t do much more anyway. I highlighted some of my design choices in my new video here.
Cool, they won’t all be Chia, I do a lot of other stuff too, but still!
I am subscribed to other tech and homelab channels like Craft Computing, so it’s really up my alley. Cheers.
It’s up to you - I think the PCIe 3.0 performance is 3500 MB/sec cap? Each of those 980 pros can do 7,000 MB/sec reads (I forgot write specs) so if you double them up into a RAID 0 array, you are missing out on a lot of additional speed by sticking it in a PCIe 3.0 setup.
To my understanding, none of the commercial SSDs is going to have a sustained write speed over 3000MB/s, which really renders the whole Pcie 3 vs 4 useless.
Btw, congrats on your build.
Damn, you are spot on @ChiaNoob - I just checked Tom’s for the 980 Pro and it also falls off a cliff from max write speed after an initial burst - I stand corrected!
Any idea what the expected throughput of this build with a Intel Core i9-10850K is? Just toying with the idea of building another plotting pc.
I think my 5600x does just over 2tb a day and my 5900x does just over 4tb. Need more days to pass to get more info.
