Was anyone considered plotting beyond k32 to have larger plots, so each drive has a plot pass the filter less frequently?
In a theoretical world where your single plot size was identical to your hard drive space, you would only need to spin up the hard drive once per 1.4 hours (1/512 chance of passing the filter every 10 seconds).
That could be pretty good power savings, but plotting to get there would be a challenge. For example, a single k39 plot might nicely fill a 16 TB drive but it would require something like 40TB of temp space, which is a lot of ssd. Do you think people will eventually move to these mega plots, or will the price/TB of SSDs beat out spinning disks first and make the power consumption of the farming disk a non-issue?
Hibernation cycles kill HDDs. As with most electronics, it’s “on-off” cycles that apply the most wear on components, not 100% duty.
Given how little electricity HDDs use anyway, for lowest total cost of ownership (including the hardware resources needed to plot, e-waste, etc), I encourage you to disable hibernation.
As an anecdote, all of my HDDs in my NAS with hibernation have died after several years. None of my HDDs with hibernation disabled (including the exact same model) have ever died.
It’s kind of a moot point. Nobody has plotted a k39 and there’s only one k38 known to exist. Too much can go wrong creating such a large plot. And by the time it becomes feasible to create a k39 in less than a day, disk capacity will be orders of magnitude larger than it is today.
That being said, it’s totally reasonable to create k33 and k34 plots to fill in remaining space. For example, on a 12 TB disk the near-optimal configuration is 102 K32 and 4 K33.