Plot takes cca 3700 seconds.. copy takes 4600 seconds

Chia Plotting
1

hi guys, I’m new to chia - I like it… learning ubuntu and staff… but I have one question:
on my system, crazymax (I know… :slight_smile: can do plot in cca 3700 seconds… but now I want to full up usb 3.0 external drives 2.5 and it takes 4600 seconds, which is way more than when I used internal sata drive as destination (cca 800 seconds)

  • I think you know what I want to say -
    how to deal with it?

I don’t want to wait for copy for some 1000 extra seconds copy time but is there any better way how to do it? I want system to copy first plot and only after it was copyied, I want system to copy another (destination is HDD, no SDD, so to don’t have defragment HDD)

is there any “trick” in madmax or ubuntu how to make it more professional?

start plotting → copy plot and start a new plot → don’t copy new plot if the old plot is still in transfer…

I’m just learning ubuntu and plotting so maybe some of you, more experienced, will help me with the solution I don’t even know about…

thank you in advance.

edit: sorry, forgot to tell: plotter is windows 10. farmer is ubuntu. so I’m on windows for plotting :confused:

edit2: WOW! just googled more and it looks like back usb 3.0 ports and front usb 3.0 ports on PC are not always the same … 35MB/s vs. 100MB/s - I will try it. more info here Why can I transfer only 35 MB/s to my USB 3.0 external hard disk? - Super User

2

As you mentioned, its your USB. Try to use another USBT port

3

get a faster temporary drive and copy to that temporarily. Then continue plotting. Then while plotting copy to the slow drive. This will eliminate the plotting bottleneck.

4

This is what the -w flag is for in MM.
If you use it , it will wait till transfer completes then start creating a new plot.

Or you could use robocopy to pull 1 file at a time of the then fragmented drive to put then onto another drive that will then not be fragmented.

1 Like
5

Just to be clear because you are using two machines.

The 3.0 drives are attached directly to the plotter? Or are you copying over a network?
I’m asking because 4600 seconds is really slow, even USB 2.0 should be doing better than that.

How is your SSD setup for plotting, is it a single ssd or 2?

6

2 machines. but I think it is USB 3.0 port - I will try back one and it should be faster… setup is: 256GB ram pc so temp2 is ramdisk, temp 1 is ssd with 120GB primo cache

8

I recently plotted another 16TB to a WD Elements drive over USB and was surprised to find the final transfer rate recorded 200+ MB/s. Can’t remember the exact figure, but it was surprisingly quick. The transfer was complete before phase 1 of the next plot finished (currently plotting at 33min/plot). No complaints here.

Btw, no clue which USB version I’m rocking. Pretty sure its USB3.0. Plugged it into the front USB connector for convenience. It’s plenty fast. No further investigation was necessary.

9

It doesn’t solve the problem, because a fast temp drive is just a bigger buffer. Once it’s full you have to stop plotting. Unless you can move plots to final destinations fast enough sooner or later your plotter grinds to a stop.

1 Like
10

as @Bones said, your cheapest and best option is, to use -w parameter in madmax.
nothing else you need

11

just to let you know - it was solved with usb ports… front ones - 35MB/sec, rear ones - 105MB/sec (even with 3 external HDD connected to rear ports)

funny how 6000 USD machine has sh.tty USB ports at front… I’m looking at you, DELL…

1 Like
12

Most recent PCs have only two USB 3.0 SS ports. If you want more SS then a PCIe card works well, and or you can use USB 3.0 SS powered hubs.

I use USB 3.0 SS throughout and write a K33 to the external HDD in under 1800 seconds (30min).

Even my challenge time does suffer horribly while writing plots.

USB 3.0 SS is not required for Chia plotting or farming but it is ten times as fast as USB 2.0 and five times faster than regular 3.0. If you want faster plot writes and the best challenge response times, stick to SS from start to finish.

13

I have a quite powershell swap script that I wrote for Windows 10. Plot your chia to a “Final” directory on a fast SSD. Then the script will copy the finished plots from this “FIN” directory to a temp directory on a slow HDD. and then it will move the file into the folder on the HDD that the Chia GUI monitors. This prevents the Chia GUI from seeing the plots as “bad plots”, and it loops continuously allowing it to remain automated while you are plotting.

for($m=1; $m -le 50000; $m++)
{
#starts with a time delay to avoid copying during Phase 1 of plotting
‘<— 10 min start delay -------------------->’
(Get-Date).DateTime
sleep 600
‘<— Plot Copy & Move to Farmer Starting —>’
(Get-Date).DateTime
#Local HDD Copy starting
Copy-Item B:\Chia\Fin*.plot D:\HDD\Temp
sleep 3
Remove-Item B:\Chia\Fin*.plot
sleep 3
Move-Item D:\HDD\Temp*.plot D:\HDD
‘<— Plot Copy & Move Complete ------------->’
(Get-Date).DateTime
}