Aren’t you bothered by the space they take + their power consumption?
Not yet! These may look bigger in the picture than they really are - they are the “SFF” style case so they are actually pretty small. As for the power, I do still need to measure them to see what they take. The processors are mostly idle so I can’t imagine they take much power compared to the rest of the rig, but it would be good to know! I’m also planning on running Storj nodes on each of these to fill up the extra space on the drives, so there is some benefit to having a bit more power. Oh, speaking of - can a Pi run almost 20 harvesters for different forks for 60 disks all at once? I know the Pi 4’s are powerful but I don’t know where they sit in relation to an old quad core i5 with 16gb of RAM.
1 Like
Pi4s most probably can’t do 20 harvesters but I could be wrong. They’re also troublesome when working with more than 30 drives, and you can’t do sata easily with them. Storj needs more processing power that’s for sure. Old SFF format Dell desktop towers are a cheap option. The main advantage of Pis is the low power but I can see why you went a different route.
1 Like
The other big reason is that I already had them! 
I won them along with almost 100 of their friends at an auction awhile back and I’ve been planning to refurb them and stick them on ebay. HEY speaking of - does anybody want some old Dell SFF Optiplex harvesters?? 
1 Like
At @enderTown the wholesale refurb corp I buy now and then HP stuff they offer also the Dell Optiplex 7010 SFF is at 50 Euro now incl VAT instead of 100 Euro, looks like they don’t manage to get rid of them …
screenshot of their price tag now …
Still far from a bad deal a PSU costs aprox the same, as a case, etc …
Btw thanks to you been looking into stl files for HDD stacking/cages now I need to figure out which 3D printer is a good buy lol
1 Like
At that price, I will not buy more Pis! Mind sharing a link to the seller (here or in private)?
@aurelius Sent a PM with the corps I use, note they will require a VAT no , well at least when I order …
1 Like
Yep they are great little machines, especially with a cheap 128/256GB SSD as boot drive. A normal student or information worker probably couldn’t tell much of a difference between it and a more modern machine. They even usually come with a Windows 7/8 license tied to the motherboard which can be used to activate a fresh install of Windows 10!
I still really like the idea of using a Pi as a harvester, but these little machines are a lot of fun too!
The sole use of Pi I have is 1 that is used as node/staking wallet for some old crypto’s and the second one is actually also a Pi but well paid way more than it should cost but can’t complain as a Helium HNT miner/node, my third Pi which is in my garaga box a street further is a free emrit one also to well mine Helium HNT, they only consume a 5W power and make money
Never looked into it how to use it to farm/plot CHIA XCH
GPU stuff … ugly but it works
I have somewhere fancy pics of a friend that went wacko when bitmain sold a 1000s of S9 antminers at $79 (refurbished) a year or 3 ago , he bought a a large sea shipping container and well totally refurbed it to store all he bought. Need to dig for that where I stored those pics… is he in profit… according himself yes …
Edit: actually always worth to check the bitmain website, they have often such deals of well antminers they drop from their farms … easy to signup, login is through a sms code
3 Likes
Hi,
This is my first post on this forum. Thanks for the market info on 4TB vs 18TB drives. I live in the UK, and what costs a dollar in the US costs a pound (GBP) in the UK. Our economy is known as “rip off Britain”. I also came to the conclusion that multiple 4TB drives (or even 2TB) are currently the most cost effective in terms of cost per TiB. Our electricity cost has just gone up from about £0.16/kWh to £0.24/kWh, the latter being about USD0.33 / kWh. It’s not a deal breaker, but the last time our electricity cost $0.07 / kWh was about 20 years ago!
Appreciate your post thankyou
2 Likes
Agreed! Love it, very clean. Classic build vs. buy - buy what you can afford or don’t want to build and build everything else! 
No problem!
1 Like
@enderTown I’m curious about your thoughts on how the offer from this seller recommended by Chia themselves compares to your JBOD solution. How do they compare in your eyes - beside the fact that your drives are new?
1 Like
Looks nice! Again, it is just the same build vs. buy argument. My drives aren’t new either, I’m using
refurbished enterprise SATA drives. My average is about $12/TB and about $10/disk for the add-in cards, port multipliers, cables and power supplies. I don’t think you’ll be able to find lower prices than that because resellers have to make some profit too BUT if you buy instead of build, you’ll get everything ready-to-go and warrantied. I’ve had a lot of fun and I’ve learned a huge amount - to me, I’ve won twice cause I’ve spent as little as possible AND learned new marketable skills. To others, their time might be worth more than the time spent to learn and build and a pre-built solution like this will work great!
Could you share more detail on this build
I need to read this thread and the previous thread more in details, I thought you were going with new drives. The main difference then between yours and theirs is the density and the hands-free that caters more to C-level management than small business. It’s interesting that you think of it in terms of a learning experience, it goes to show how crypto is still very much an industry that catters to enthusiasts. Thanks for your input!
1 Like
Thanks for sharing your journey with us! Could you give an indication of the overhead / TB you will have once your rack is filled?
So the total cost (outside the drives themselves) divided by the total capacity of the rack of 240 drives (let’s maybe assume 10TB/ drive?).
I am interested to see if scaling hurts your average cost/TB.
Hope you can get back on this, but I understand if you are not willing to share.
1 Like
About 13USD / TB 
It’s not the cheapest solution
Using an HBA card and expander backplane.Hundreds of hard disks can be attached to one PC.
I’m sorting out the information.And will writing a topic later
1 Like
Yep I have been keeping track and I’ll try to post a list soon.
Agreed! This project and post was originally built back when cost per TB was at its peak and it was almost impossible to find used SAS JBODs. In fact I just found a sweet deal on nine Dell SC200’s, each filled with twelve 4TB hard drives! I got them all for about $3200 including freight. They even included the SAS cables. I should be able to daisy chain them to a single server and my all-in cost will be less than $8/TB! That will be my next project so I’ll be very interested in your guide!
1 Like