Replace Plotter with Farmer

I have an expensive, power hungry plotter which I want to replace with a min-spec laptop.

I have 34 external WD HDDs.

This is a cheap laptop off eBay. 256GB SSD. I am worried about the 34 external HDDs through one USB.

Anybody have an experience with this or knowledge/feedback please?

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I think it has 3x USB 3.2 (Gen1, 5Gb/s).
But also check what specific CPU is used. If it’s a dual core, that may be a weak point with high tx volumes/dust storms.

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Thanks, I have asked for further details from eBay seller.

People are using Raspberry PI-4 to harvest why not that laptop? How are all those WD drives connected?

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Powered USB 3.0 Hub RSHTECH 10 Port Aluminum USB 3.0 Data Hub Splitter with Individual On/Off Switches and 12V/3A Power Adapter (RSH-A10)

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That’s too small, and will choke (eventually, and likely not far into the future) with current database size and your OS. 512GB and larger is really needed.

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If you didn’t buy it yet, maybe you could look at those mini pcs. I have my farmer running on a similar model as listed here - Gigabyte Brix mini PC kit GB-BRi7H-8550 | eBay (this one is i7, mine is i5, same generation). I purchased it brand new long time ago, and it came with PNY SSD 250GB (kind of crap, but still works OK as the OS drive). I have added NVMe (it has a slot for it) to hold both dbs (bc and wallet). I RDP to it if needed, so don’t have anything connected to it but power and Ethernet (it has WiFi, but I am not using it). With chia running, it draws ~10-20 W at the wall.

It is for sure not the best as the primary box, but you can get by on it if needed.

By the way, Gigabyte has several different models, so don’t look at those Celeron based, as those are old Celerons that don’t have FPU, as such syncing from scratch takes weeks (killed the initial sync after a week of basically no progress, didn’t copy synced bc, so don’t know whether it could keep up, but I doubt it).

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Looks like a neat little harvester…

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As harvester, the Celeron version (J4105) is fast enough (for USB drives) - Gigabyte GB-BLCE-4105 PC 8 GB RAM BGA 1090 J4105 1.5 GHz  | eBay.

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Oh man did I see a 10baseT coax connector on that box :rofl: :rofl: :rofl:

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Sometimes you get lucky and there is a parallel port on there too. Now you can put that $5 yardsale inkjet printer to use.