I got 4 flax on my Pi4. I also farm Chia on HPool without any issue.
The External Drive HDDs are gonna die after months without proper cooling and the manufacturer will decline RMA after they checked the SMART values and realized your HDDs were running 24/7.
But yeah, if someone would ask me to recommend a mainboard I would say Asus Pro WS WRX80E-SAGE SE WIFI.
The JBOD itself is not that expensive. If we are talking something like a Dell 3200i, I found ones for like $150-$200 with caddies. The expensive part is outfitting it with the SAS drives. The mini SAS controller and 2x mini SAS cables are cheap.
However, I recommend getting cheaper servers, something like the Dell R720 with 2x Xeons and at least 8 SAS (SATA) caddies. For the price of most JBODs, you can get up to 2 Dell 720 servers. The benefit of getting the server is that it is self contained and can farm or plot by itself.
56 on Asus M11F, can’t go any further
I strongly recommend mini PCs for farming. I’m using used HP T520 for harvesting which costs about 30usd. It can easily handle 42 drives (6x7usb hub) and I had it handling 84 drives (5x7 USB hub + 7x7USB hubs daisy chained). This needs to be done via USB 2.0 configurable in bios. Cheap and energy efficient solution.
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Can you point a single warranty statement that will void warranty of external HDD if used 24/7 ? I haven’t seen anything like this.
The external HDDs are the same units as the internal ones. At least for Seagate you can shuck drive unplug SATA to USB adapter if needed. In case of WD the adapter is soldered to the drives.
Which is why you just run the farmer and forget the full node 
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Thanks for sharing. I have two questions:
- What is your average look up time when harvesting. Can you stay below 5 sec.
- One HP T520 handles 84 drives via usb 2.0. Could you provide more photos of your vertical rack. Your setup is very compact.
I do agree that the out-of-the-box old gen PC can be very cheap. Harvester does not require much spec and decent PC would do the job. This solution partially answers my initial question, but not fully. It’s still many harvesters.
Hi, Can you tell me what kind of power supply is this power supply? and what usb disk adapters did you use?
This is mean well pspa-12-1000 PSU. USB adapters are the ones that came with hdd - these are 2.5inch shucked HDDs. Hubs are Amazonbasics 7 port hubs.
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Thanks for the answer, I have a farm based on USB drives and at over 40 problems started to happen that they disappear or are not seen. I think this is a problem with the usb limit and I want to put it on HP.
The USB specification plans for 127 device adresses on the USB bus, and it is tempting to deduce from this that you can connect up to 127 devices on a USB port.