So, i am a relatively new (absolutely new) farmer. I have a couple of questions that I’ve compiled.
Opinions on my setup
I’ve got a Lian Li Lancool mesh 2 with two 20TB drives (2x 10TB iron wolf pro) connected to this single system with an i9 10900, 32GB of ram, and a 250SSD for a boot drive with a 2TB Samsung 970 Evo Plus plotter on an MSI z490A Pro MOBO. I plan on just getting another 970 Evos as needed when this one inevitably dies (will likely raid two for 4TB). I will be expanding this to 30TB, got an additional 10TB drive coming in. This is all internal storage. This machine plots about 5-6 plots (if properly timed/queued) in parallel stable. I’ve noticed that trying to do 5-6 at once will cause sync issues from what I assume to be CPU overutilization as the plotters take up all the resources. I’ve set it up in such a way that it is split, so 2 plots are in stage 1 at any one given time and the rest are in some other stage. Opinions? Thoughts? Comments? lol.
Plans for expansion and questions [This is the main stuff]
I’ve ordered a PCIe 5 port USB 3.0 expansion card… It will add 5 usable ports per card that I plan to plug in external HDDs to… So far I’ve got three 12TB ones incoming. Can’t find any 14+ so taking what I get. I am going to have this all connected to one system. I have questions about this. I currently use the Win10 GUI. I’m sure I can venture into the CLI, but so far I have not even attempted. My questions are in regards to firstly harvesting. Is this system good for harvesting? I’ve seen that a late response can mean a lost reward. How do I check to ensure that my responses are optimal and not being wasted or missed? In addition to this, I do have TWO spare Dell Optiplex computers. Very old, nothing to really see here just bare-bones 4GB ram, 2550GB HDD, dual or quad-core super old intel CPU… the works. Is it possible AT ALL to make use of these? Can I turn them into harvesters? How would I even do that? Plotters? How would I connect them to the storage on the main system? The plotting part I can figure out creatively, but migrating those finished plots to the main system? How? And what is the benefit of multiple harvesters? Do I need them? Will it make any improvement if my main host machine is optimally performing? Is it a wasted effort i shouldn’t even worry about granted that i can verify somehow that my main machine is responding well and not missing opportunities due to late responses? As you can see, I’m a mess of questions. Any and all advice is appreciated, and if you have resources like videos or guides that break down each question, I’d very much appreciate it but I’d also really appreciate a detailed post giving me your opinions on it all as well. I appreciate any input!
Do you have any general tips for me? Let me know! Thanks again for your time!
I would more likely consider using the second nvme drive as the final drive to speed up the finish off of the plots by 15mins or so. then periodically move those plots to an HDD. I do this now on 2 pc’s that would not really be able to make use of the extra drive space due to other bottlenecks in the system, e.g. ram or threads etc.
I think i do this differently to others from what i read here, but say I’m doing 6 plots on a system at once, i run this as 6 separate q’s q1,q2 etc and then manually start them in a staggered fashion. once I’ll start them off with say 5 plots per q and then add plots to the q as they go down, this also allows me to manage the destination drive of a particular q. I have several ext hdd’s on one pc, so they alternately write to diff hdd’s
I can’t comment on the system as a whole but… from a ram perspective with 4gb or ram, this machine would do 1 plot at a time. better than nothing.
Do you mean 250gb hard drive and not 2550? if so, this will not work as a temp drive… it needs more space than that for 1 plot. could you add a cheapo sata ssd drive for plotting and something as a final drive.
all in all considering this system as it sits it’s probably a better deal to buy plots than spend money on it.
I have one external hdd that i plug in and out of plotting pc’s to move plots to a farming pc drive. cut/paste and repeat… others use their networks and or scripts in python or whatever but i’m not technical enough to do that so i do it the manual way.
Ohhhh, i see!! I can just do a manual copy over - Brilliant loool! I was over complicating it. I think ill do that, and yes it was a typo - only 250GB drive but i will be both increasing the ram ( I work for an I.T Company and trust me we’ve got TONS laying around grabbing a few sticks is fine and done all the time ) and i will also be putting in a sata drive for plotting. Likely a 1tb. Im aiming for only 8GB of ram though. So i think i can make it work. I’ll have it plot to a seperate 1TB external drive i have and transfer roughly 9 or so plots whenever it is filled. That works for me! Better than nothing, but what about the harvester portion of this? does it matter? do i need to test to ensure my main machine is harvesting efficiently and not taking ages to respond and losing rewards?
there are a lot of threads on this forum about harvesters…(and their problems) again i didn’t even get into this level of complexity. i just shared a few drives on a second pc to my main farmer and it looks the plots up there too (added the folders via the link in the plotting page of the gui). never had a slow warning so it must be sub 5 seconds to do it. which is all i see that matters.