Hi there @codinghorror , how many plots in parallel are you getting with the 5950x? I have a similar setup with a 3950x, but am afraid of running out of memory. Currently at 32gb ram, with 2 x 2tb Intel nvme drives, will be adding another 32 gb ram next week. I’m doing 8 in parallel at the moment, staggering each subsequent plot by an hour. Appreciate if you have any advice on the plotting setup. Thanks! Awesome setup you have there with the NUCs and 3950x 
I do 12 in parallel on the 5950x, that seems to be a good balance for me.
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Thanks a bunch! That’s a good reference point to use.
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My 500 TB farming rig, a 36 bay supermicro server:
Since this is in a living space I’ve done some modifications to cut down on noise by replacing the PSU and fans. I was also having issues with the system randomly freezing up with the motherboard/cpu/ram that came with it, so just did a fresh build ( MBD-X11SSH-LN4F-O motherboard with a Xeon E3-1220 V6 Kaby Lake 3.0 GHz cpu) in the case rather than bother debugging hardware issues, though it was likely just bad ram. The power supply location isn’t ideal but really the only option apart from having it external, but should have adequate airflow with 9 fans, and the psu fan does face the direction of airflow in the case.
Currently running at 1/3rd capacity but I’ll be connecting the front backplane and adding drives to the front as needed. Currently plotting ~8TB per day on 4 machines (3800x, 5800x, a NUC, and using only half the capacity of my daily use PC, an older i7 machine). Anyone else using used enterprise gear?
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So I’ve been meaning to ask someone to write up a tutorial on how to start using enterprise gear exactly like that. I’ve been interested in getting a big rack and a bunch of SAS drives, but even as a pretty tech savvy guy I don’t really know where to start.
Would you be interested in writing up a high level guide to how you setup that 500tb rig here? I bet the community would be stoked! 
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Sure thing! I can work on putting some info together sometime next week
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Possbiy bad RAM. Possibly air flow. The SuperMicro boards in those machines run hot and are designed to draw air through the front drive bays, force it over the backplane to accelerate the static pressure, and then ram it across the motherboard and passive CPU coolers. The original machine, if intact, would have an a transparent acrylic cowling that sits over the motherboard and makes sure air moves across it.
Couple of things, if you don’t have drive bay blockers in, put blue tape over the front grills of any empty drive bays. Also, on the left and right are air flow holes used for the high CFM fans that come with the device. Put blue tape over those air holes too. Those air holes are there specifically so that the high CFM fans don’t starve, but with Noctuas in the medial fan bracket they won’t be pulling enough air through the front drive bays to cool the drives and also to cool the backplane chipset.
I can see you have a Noctua 40mm on the HBA, good choice. Those HBAs are again designed to get a huge amount of airflow over them and passively cool the heatsink.
If you are mounting drives in the front bay, make sure you obtain drives that are rated for installation in at least 24 storage bays because synchronous vibration will trash the heads on your hard drives faster than you can spit. Nothing worse than having one drive after another fail all within a couple of weeks of each other because someone cheaped out and bought drives not rated for that kind of installation.
Also, make sure you put all the screws in each drive. Four screw holes? Four screws. Don’t let those drives rattle themselves to death.
I’ve got a 846 24 bay with an old Rampge IV Extreme and a 6-core 3690X 3.9Ghz from 2011, 64GB DDr3 running my farm. 1280w Platinum 80+ Whisper Quiet Super Micro PSU (barely audible), and I replaced the stock fans with the Super Micro Whisper fans which are around 40dB and if you tune them down, actually sit at about 24dB. My 846 plugs in to three more CSE-847 45 bay JBODs, again with swapped out fans and the 1280w Platinum PSU from SuperMicro. Tie it all together with SFF-8084 cables. You can hear the server, you know it’s there, but it ain’t all that loud. What’s nice about the CSE you have is the drive indicators can be programmed to show how much XCH are sat on the farm.
P.S. Nice mods.
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I think I’m going to Hell now, I just put a 10! dollar graphics card I picked from a pile into a ryzen 3900x system with 64GB RAM, 4GB gen 4 nvme and 84TB of hdd space…what has the world come to 
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Hey there, I’m interested in getting an icy box too. Just wondering if it will accept 18tb hard drives? I’ve been looking at multiple enclosures, but those that will take in 18tb per bay are just too small(5 bay max so far), or the big enclosures would only take up to 16tb per bay.
Second rig running! Had to put my dark hero and 5950x to use other than Warzone 
Only plotting and sending the finished plots over the network to the USB 3.1 farm drive on my primary rig. Should be able to plot 24 in parallel now.
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Nothing specialist for chia here, gaming PC with added storage and now beefed up ram. 5950x, 64gb 3600cl16, 500gb sn850 (OS), single 4tb mp510 (Gen3) and 4x14tb mounted in the back, few elements sat around once these are filled (around 100tb total). 2.9TiB/day along with the 3080 doing a little earning on nicehash.
2nd plotter already planned, pair of p5510 ran off the m.2 slots, 5950x and 64gb into it swapped from the gaming rig, 5800x and 32gb into the gaming rig. Just waiting for a reward for some sanity then I’ll green light it and start accruing more storage!
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I just ordered mine. What do you think? I’m hoping to do 32 plots in parallel using 1 core, 4g ram and 256ssd per plot. Based on the write speeds of the ssd I think I could do around 192 plots per day.
Thread ripper 32core 2990WX
ASRock X399 TAICHI Motherboard
G.SKILL TridentZ RGB Series 128GB ram
Samsung 980 pro 2Tb ssd x4
Liquid cooled cpu
50- 8tb external hdd
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wow u area so lucky!!!
really can do 192 PLOT per day?
Not sure that’s going to be possible using a single box. The 2990WX will likely drop pretty far towards 3.0Hhz meaning plotting times will be 7Hrs - 8Hrs a piece without any other bottlenecks. So my guess if there are no other bottlenecks is that you’ll get closer to 100 plots a day maximum.
Also, make sure you have a decent offload strategy, where are the plots being written to when done? That can quickly become a bottleneck with the other components this powerful. You’ll really need to manage that well!
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Just wanted to post an alternative to a Ryzen 5950X.
I have one of these motherboards dual cpu X99 motherboards from eBay, coupled with two Intel Xeon E5-2650 v4 (24 core, 48 threads) and 128 GB ECC DDR4 ram.
The overall cost of these parts was less than a 5950X and while it lacks the single core performance of modern Ryzen CPUs (and of course gen 4 NVMe SSD speeds) it is still pumping out 21 concurrent plots via three Sabrent 2TB Rocket NVMe SSDs. The plots are taking twelve hours but that’s 42 a day which is pretty good.
The Chia rush might have changed the costs of the parts but it broke down like this a few months ago:
- Motherboard £110
- Matched pair Intel Xeon E5-2650 v4 £240.00
- DDR4 ECC 4 x 32GB £260.00
(edit: replace 5850X with 5950X 
)
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Yeah man!! That’s another way to get it done!! 4.2/TB day is excellent! I’m paying for raw speed with 5900x. It’s almost the equivalent of 4 of those e5-2650’s 
Careful with those Threadrippers! They tend to disappoint with Chia and they’re crazy expensive!!
https://www.amd.com/en/products/cpu/amd-ryzen-threadripper-2990wx
That one is a gen 2 and it’s only got a 3.0GHz base clock speed vs the 3.8GHz of the 3900x or 5900x, the key with Chia is both number of cores and the raw performance per core!