Let’s use this long running thread to showcase our various rigs we’re using for both plotting and farming.
I’ll get it started. I’ve previously plotted about 15 plots on a 2019 MacBook Air running an external NVME drive and an external 5tb hard drive. Obviously not the fastest.
I’ve since moved over to an Ubuntu NUC, running the same 1TB NVME drive, and that 5TB external (until I fill it). And I also have a Yottamaster 4 bay enclosure, with 2 renewed data center 12TB hard drives I got off of Amazon.
I’m currently wrestling with some weird plotting pauses on my NUC so I haven’t actually successfully plotted since setting it up this week, but I’m hopeful once it’s going I can get > 0.5TB a day on it.
I’m also currently farming from the same rig, it seems to handle that just fine.
(Sorry for the wire mess, still fiddling with things before I put it away cleanly 
)
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I will continue, so I have 2 plotters with Asus Hyper M2 cards:
I am making > 30 plots per day on one machine, so I decomissioned one machine - because I don’t have enough disks to handle all the plots:
!
I am also plotting on SATA SSD’s
but I think that it will be better idea to invest in 2 TB MVME drives instead of 1 TB NVME drives, and in the place of SSD’s just put the HDD’s - one plot per HDD.
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Wow that’s quite the setup! What’s your end goal for number of plots? How have the Chia winnings been so far with that setup?
No target, just enjoying the ride, this is a hobby for me, I will try to farm some more Chia, fill the disks that I already have (less than 300 TB at the moment) and maybe spend some Chia when it will launch, so I hope I will breakeven.
Winnings are random, I can farm a few days without a block, and sometimes I am winning a few blocks in a row.
Do you plan to fill at least 2 more slots on this snowwhite Yottamaster box?
Yeah that’s my plan, but it’s going to take a while to fill the first two drives anyway so I’m in no rush. I also told myself I want to win a few blocks before I keep investing in equipment.
I’m already relatively hooked though, so I’m sure I’ll get anxious and buy more sooner than I thought haha
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30 plots a day is great! How much ram does your machine have? Are you doing parallel plots or series? Thx
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I’m doing about 50 plots a day on an ugodly abomination of old computers and extrnal drives that I have wiped and reinstalled with ubuntu. Damned if I have yet to find a machine that doesn’t run better under ubuntu than the native OS it shipped with.
It’s way better than sending them to the landfill, and more entertaining for sure.
I bought a couple shelving units at home depot today to “rack” it all and once I have it looking less like I am insane, I will post!
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AMD Ryzen 9 3900X 12c/24t
128GB DDR4 3200MHz
4x Inland Platinum 2TB M.2 SSD (RAID-0) for temp
ASUS TUF Gaming X570-PLUS
ASUS Hyper M.2 v4
Samsung 870 evo SSD (for Ubuntu 20.0.4 server OS)
4x 16TB Seagate x16 exos (for storing plots)
NZXT H510
I can do around 21 plots in parallel, but I usually stagger each plot by ~1 hour. Approx ~4TB/day
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Wow that’s quite the rig, nice job.
At 4 TB a day, you’re going to fill up your existing storage in a little over 2 weeks. What’s your end goal for storage? Are you thinking about getting a big 45 bay unit or something?
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DUDE, already filled all of it!!! every spare drive I own. 561 plots See: Plotting as a service - paas
Wow. Forget plotting as a service. You should just build these rigs and sell them at 200% markup on ebay. In this market, you’d kill it. 
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This is my hardware… haven’t connected it yet. I’m hoping I can figure this out and get Farming.
Any comments or suggestions on what I have is welcomed. Thanks.
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nice, cool monitor!! 
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I hope none of you get jealous of my sweet rig! This is v2.0. The first iteration didn’t have the fans and tripped all the SMART thresholds for temperature on those disks. Lol.
I started plotting with this one about 10 days ago and it won a block (2 XCH) at 27 plots and again tonight at 51 plots, so I basically have to let it run forever now if it’s going to be that lucky. Haha.
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How Does This Rig Look for Plotting?
Came across some HP servers. Looking for some advice on how to best fit one out.
I can get a decent price on 1TB SSDs. I plan on qty=6 of them in the slots - talking via SAS. Then I will place spinning rust (HDD) in a slot for storing plots - to be transferred to my farming rig.
Specs (10-core) HP ProLiant DL580 G7
- Intel Xeon Deca Core E7-4850 2.00GHz
- 96GB DDR3 SDRAM
- USB, VGA, LAN, Smart Array P410i
- Warranty: 6 months
Questions
- What’s the bottleneck? If I fill up enough slots (e.g., 6TB) bottleneck is the 96GB RAM? Can the 2GHz processor cores handle 24 parallel plots?
- I can get 2x octal cores - or I can get 2x deca. Should I max out the cores, or is 10-core already overkill?
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I am a total sucker for high end NUCs, I love the damn things, so here’s my primary plot farm:
- 3 Hades Canyon i7 (8th gen 4c/8t) w/ 2tb thunderbolt tekq ssd dump drives
- 3 Ghost Canyon i9 (9th gen 8c/16t) w/ 10tb WD Orico enclosure hdd dump drives
All machines have 32gb ram, 1tb boot NVME (2 plots) and 2tb data NVME (3+ plots).
Note that I am currently exfiltrating using the “god combo” of the plugable tool-less heatsink NVMe enclosure and the very low power SK Hynix Gold P31 1tb which is extremely reliable for sneakernetting just under 1tb off the machines at a time, via the USB superspeed 20 ports on the front of each machine, at around 550mb/sec.
Hooked up through a neat kill-a-watt power strip that shows me current and peak power consumption for all this stuff.
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I call him my Frankenstein monster.
Intel Core i7 9700KF 3.6GHz 8 Core CPU32gb ram
32gb Ram
2 x 1TB SSD/S4610 2.5" SATA 6Gb (For Plotting)
2 x 6TB Seagate Expansion Desktop External Hard Drive HDD (Plot Storage)
3 x 4TB 3.5" SATA Hard Drive HDD (Plot Storage)
Think I will stop plotting once all drives are full. Still haven’t decided whether to use the 2 x 1TB for storing plots or leave them free for future plotting. I may fill them up and then move the plots if \ when I add more storage. Trying to fight the urge to keep adding more and more drives.
The 2 GPUs were what I was using to mine Ethereum as a hobby but Chia has helped me go green.
I have developed 2 powershell scripts. One to restart plotting automatically after a restart and the other to farm and monitor farming on 5 minute loops. Happy to share the code if any Windows users are interested.
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Loving the stack of WD external drives just outta frame! 
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