Hi all
Here is my farming rig 
24TB USB-disks connected to Synology DS
RPi 4 8GB for farming
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Yeah, I have a 3600X plotting with a gen 4 SSD as well so know the difference in the single threaded performance. It’s just a cheap way of getting lots of cores. I already had the machine, but would definitely go for a Ryzen if I had an unlimited budget. My time to win decreases daily so I hope I’ll win some soon and can re-visit the budget.
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Any reason you went for a 8GB RPi 4 for farming? Does it need it? I have a 4GB one which I was intending to take over the farming duties once I’ve caught up with the plotting (if that is ever possible).
Only because i had it already.
I use Ubuntu Desktop, but for farming 4GB should be OK
Currently performing maintenance on my main farming machine. It’s a Celeron N4100 mini PC. I have a pair of 2tb external HDDs connected to it (not pictured).
My plotting rig (not pictured) is a Dell 7010 desktop with an i5 3570 and 16gb ram. I have the 500gb 870 evo in it as a scratch drive. I now have about 6.2 hr plot times on that machine.
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Nice rig! I am in the process of setting up a similar machine. Would you mind elaborating on the plotting parameters you used? 7 plots in parallel x 3 drives. What delay? Max RAM and max threads? Are you using a fast dump drive before transferring the plots onto HDDs? Are you using Ubunto or Windows? Have you optimized your plotting with Swar? If so, how did you set it up?
Thanks.
Happy plotting/farming!
Hi - I’m using plotman
scheduling:
tmpdir_max_jobs: 7
global_max_jobs: 21
global_stagger_m: 60
polling_time_s: 20
plotting:
k: 32
e: False
n_threads: 5
n_buckets: 128
job_buffer: 8000
The machine is at 50% CPU and 35% RAM usage so has more headroom. I’m using the machine for other stuff for the day job so haven’t maxed out resources deliberately.
Oh - and I’m on Linux.
This is my rig:
@codinghorror saw a partial version of that in Keybase I think and this is the final version I finished one week ago. I’d to work very fast because I’d scheduled a trip for two months in Sudamerica, so I’m managing everything remotely right now using ssh and some scripts.
Details:
- 5 plotters machines: 4 of them are very similar with 8 core cpu and 32 RAM and the one of the left is a 500 USD experiment which is giving me about 12 plots daily (ChiaNet: Build & Install Guide: Budget Plotting Build - $500 - 1.3 TB/day). The 3 of the right I got them from an ETH miner who bought them to take off the credit card. So I was very lucky to find this guy with a complimentary hobby. I got them for about 700 USD each and I needed to buy the nvme disks, 16 more RAM and very cheap graphics cards, only to start the machines.
- 70x 8TB Seagate from Costco. I got them for 120 USD each and I was lurking several Costco places and doing experiments to buy them fast.
- NVME disks: 1x 4GB, 1x 2GB, 4x 1GB and 2x512GB. I did some experiments trying to figure out what is the best combination.
- A lot of NVME PCI adapters
- Sata Disks: 1x18TB, 1x16TB, 4x14TB Seagate disks. I got them previous the prices went up.
- 8x USB 3.0 extension cables.
- Two Mr ironstone bar table 47’’ tables and 4 Long heavy duty power strip 16 from Amazon. I put them together because I was extremely lucky that the size is almost the same, so it was very easy to put the strip under the tables.
- Two UPS Cyberpower 1500 VA from bestbuy. The UPS I had collapsed when I connected the 3er outlet and I’d to buy these fast, so I got them from a Best Buy store.
- 35 USD Gigabit Hub with cat7 wires.
My initial plan was to have separated the plotters with the farmers. I have 2 rock pi 4A machines for that, but the 16x usb I had for that failed and because my trip, I had to move fast and I finished with this. At my return if I’d buy more disks I’ll try again probably with this separation.
I’m using right now one of these rock pi 4 to access to the plotters, using it as a bastion host with fail2ban to limit hacking attempts. I have a gigabit router for communication and I’m using CAT6 wires but I couldn’t get any improvement compared a normal cable.
I’m getting about 70-80 plots daily with this setup and I invested around 16K in all of that. I hope to optimize it a little bit and getting 90-100 plots daily but having only 700TB (I’ve done 60TB previous the trip), if it’s going too fast it’ll fill the disks previous to my return so i hope to come back around the same day when all the disks are full.
Right now I’ve 1050 plots and only 6 XCH :’(
These are the pictures. One is from the day and another one at the night.
P.S I’m a cloud engineer and it’s my first time doing something like that with “real hardware”. I’ve built my own computers all my life but nothing compared to this. Also the price is the sum of all my previous rigs together.
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any recommendation on USB hub
you connect all that to one harvester?
I daisy chain the usb disks. There is a maximum of 5 and I do it with just four so I connect 16 disks in each computer using only 4 usb ports.
Hello, I am thinking building a machine with 4x18TB like you. How many XCH are you getting? Thanks
Hi @MrWrite - FYI you can buy “5TB Seagate Portable” USB drives from Amazon, “shuck” the drive (extract the SATA drive) from its enclosure and they should successfully install directly into those hot-swap trays on your HP server. I believe SATA drives can be installed into SAS slots.
These 5TB Portable drives are 15mm high, so they don’t fit in laptops, but they do fit nicely in enterprise server HDD trays!
I don’t recommend connecting SSD’s via SAS. If you can get NVME SSD’s to work via PCIE cards, that might be better, but I’m not certain old hardware like yours can handle that?
.
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I call this the HangMiner (HangFarmer?)
My goal here was to use as much existing hardware as possible. I had already started building an ETH mining rig a month or two back, so this was a natural continuation of that build. The only parts I purchased for Chia were hard drives (renewed, might as well use cheap recycled drives especially with the shortage of high-end drives!) and NVMEs (plus loads of SATA/power splitters). You might have to zoom into see everything, but here’s what you are looking at:
Top shelf: 8x RX480/580 8gb GPUs
Second shelf: 3 motherboards - left and right each control 4 GPUs up top and mine ETH. Middle mines ETH with a 3060 12gb and is also my Chia farmer and my Storj server which controls over 20 hard drives hanging below.
Third shelf: 22 hard drives of various sizes for about 90TB of total storage, along with 4 SATA 1 to 5 port multipliers. The port multipliers plug into 2 SATA 4x PCI-x cards that each support 6 port multipliers, for 60 total possible drives.
Fourth shelf: box fan and future space for 20 more drives. Box fan to be replaced by 6-8 120mm case fans.
Bottom shelf: 2 gaming laptops with 2060 8gb GPUs and i7 processors - both mining ETH and plotting Chia on nvme’s. Also future space for 20 more drives.
All of the white plastic hangers you see are custom designed and 3d printed by myself. I’ve got hangers designed for GPUs, power supplies, motherboards, hard drives, SATA multipliers, cable clips and PCI boards. The wire shelf you see is actually two of these that you can find at your local Walmart: Hyper Tough 3 Tier Stackable Wire Shelving Unit, Silver/Zinc, 13.4"Dx23.2"Wx30.6"H, Weight Capacity 750 lb - Walmart.com - Walmart.com (There is even instructions in the box on how to order more shelves, connectors, etc).
Not shown: 2 other PCs also plotting
Up to about 5tib a day now, over 400 plots, and I won 2 Chia last week!
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THAT COMMITMENT THOUGH. 
mad props on the achievement and the organization is on point! What room in your house does that occupy??
I’m using the basement. Fortunately nobody is using it so I can put easily 10 tables more lol
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I might have to start CA Chia Anonymous over here!! 
I got four of these, pretty much identical look wise farming chia. Running various Ryzen 9s and one threadripper. Working on hooking them up to a 10g switch at the moment. Each box can hold up to 10-11 14-16tb drives.
The case is the cooler master n400.
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#1 3960X, 128GB RAM, 4 x 970 2TB EVO Plus (another 4 soon)
#2 Dual Xeon Platinum 8160, 128GB RAM, 4 x WD black 2TB 750 (another 4 soon)
#1 nets 20 plots every 9h 30minutes
#2 nets 20 plots every 12 hours (trying 4 threads now, tomorrow will try 40 plots in parallel with the extra 4 NVMEs, but 2 threads)
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