If you are looking for something new and different, try Power Automate Desktop. Here’s my “flow” that moves completed plots over the network to the drive on the farmer that has the most available space. This way multiple plotters aren’t all writing to the same destination disk at once.
I move mine over the network to a shared folder on the drive I’m filling.
I have a NAS/server with 2 standard ethernets connected and 1 is connected into my internet router and the other port is connected to my plotter through a switch. The NAS/server is passing internet to the switch and thus the plotter. The NAS/server is Windows 2019. I am simply farming on the NAS/server and plotting on another system and passing all plots to a temp storage drive on the NAS/server via the plotting process before manually moving them to the farming RAID drive. Ultimately, this works for me because I can farm on 1 system and plot on the other at the same time with minimal loss in speed and time.
I use plotman which deals with the scheduling of plots and rsyncing them to their eventual destination, my 3 plotters each have a 1TB SSD which is the destination dir for plots, but that’s just a staging location, they are eventually rsynced (by plotman) over a dedicated gigabit network to their permanent location which is a possibly overkill EPYC 7551 mainnode/harvester/farmer with 16 hotswap bays, and 5 LSI SAS cards with SFF8088 connectors going to what I guess would be called a DAS array - that setup will scale up to 96 attached SAS disks before I need to think about adding NAS or remote harvesters.
When I plotted/farmed on the same machine, I still used an SSD for the initial destination, but had a systemd timer set up to move plots over to (local) SATA/SAS HDDs, with either approach the key is making sure that holding SSD is big enough to hold all the incoming plots before they’re rsync’ed away, and that depends on staggering, speed of network, etc - I didn’t do the math, I just stuck a spare 1TB SSD in and it seemed to work, so repeated that on the other plotters.
I use a case that holds 23 drives and use them as harvesters. As they fill, they save plots over SMB 10G to another harvester.
If you have multiple systems you should be using linux.
I just transfer the plots over the network to my server. My server has drive shares set up. If done properly, this is faster than USB. The best way to do it, and only if plotting speed is fast enough, is to fill an entire drive and move it to it’s farming location.
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