This is my home farmer setup:
Currently 8x 3.5" and 24x 2.5" bays empty that will be filled if there are offers lower than 20 € per TB.
Generic 3 port USB 3.0 hub. I went up to 3 ports because if you connect more, you will bottleneck the HDDs if they write simultaneously.
Here’s my set up. I put together two machines. I extended my main rig, which I built recently for fun; and then built up a farmer unit.
My main plotter / anything rig is called Xenon.
5950X
128GB 3600Mhz DDR4 TCreate Expert RAM
Aorus Master x570 motherboard
Sabrent Rocket 4 2TB
0.5TB operating SSD
10TB Exos HDD
LianLi dynamic 011 case.
Xenon gets 70 plots per day running Madmax with Ubuntu.
My main farmer rig is called Fractal:
Ryzen 3600
16GB 3000MHz DDR4 Oloy RAM
Gigabyte B450M D3SH WiFi v2 motherboard
Intel P4610 1.92TB U.2 NVMe connected via M.2 adapter
16 Port Host Bus Adapter
1TB Force operating SSD.
16x 12TB Exos HDD
Fractal Design Define 7XL case
(This case is really phenomenal. It holds my 16 drives comfortably and could swell to 22. It’s well ventilated. Quite compact. Quiet. Good looking. Very highly recommended if you want a farm of this size that you can tuck away and let run for many years).
Fractal gets 25 plots per day using Madmax on Windows (I kept Fractal on Windows as the networking is so much easier to handle than in Linux)
So between both machines plotting is just typically 90 to 95 plots per day; and total storage is 202TB.
I purchased more SSDs than I really needed for plotting, based on some early reports of what hardware worked that turned out to be inaccurate. But I have been playing with some incredible Seagate Nytro 1551 SSDs also. They are slower than the NVMes but endurance is practically infinite. At 1.8TB, they are specc’d for 10,000TBW each, but based on degradation so far their actual endurance is closer to 15,000TBW. Combined with Madmax plotting mostly on RAM, these drives could lower the effective cost per plot from $0.20 using NVMe in the old days (pre Madmax) down to $0.01 per plot. For people who are really in this for the long haul and working at huge scale, you should look into these drives.
Show a closeup of the connector on the floor, looks like it could be SFF-8484 which is old and ridiculously rare, also show what that cable plugs into on the backplane, because it could be a weird cable plugged into a less weird on-PCB connector like an SFF 8087.
Also, what do the power connectors on the back of that PCB look like? Is usually easier to find data connectors for backplanes than it is to match them with weird proprietary power connectors.
If you’re buying backplanes, look for these kind of connectors, everything else gets more expensive fast:
SFF 8087 and molex 4 pin power
Or these data connectors (SFF 8643)
I’ve been waiting for someone to just buy a backplane and wire it up! Screw paying $900+ for an empty NetApp 4246 or 4243!
I have exactly this setup - cheap decommissioned backplanes with 12 SAS slots each, going to cheap 16 port LSI cards. Will get a pic when it looks a bit tidier 
So it’s a older lsi raid card. Not ideal but it should work.
I can get the card to show up in bios but than the psu I have running the backplane for some reason shuts down.
I wired it to stay on.
And wired it to throttle the fan…
but can’t for whatever reason get the whole thing to stay working for longer than 5 minutes.
I’d like to use a more standard smaller psu to attach to backplane. I’m sure it doesn’t need the 900 wats this one has. . But I’m not sure how to begin with re soldering it. Is it as simple as sidling a couple 12v to the board Orr…
Any any advice is greatly appreciated
Thanks!
Thats very expensive… Where do you live?
Here is Europe you get the one with IOM3 for about 350 € with caddies and the one with IOM6 for about 450 €.
Ok looks like you do have the parts you need.
Is the PSU only powering the backplane or is it also powering a motherboard? You usually need to trick PSUs into staying on in the absence of a motherboard by shorting 2 pins.
If you can tell which pins on the backplane are 12v and which pins are 5v (and if you can get that kind of connector), you can crimp your own, shouldn’t require soldering at all - alternatively you could cut the connector from the power cable you have and crimp it to a more standard ATX connector to make your own adapter cable, lots of possible approaches to this, but for all of them you need to know exactly which pins to connect up to avoid damage/fire/shocks/etc, start by looking for pinouts for what you have.
Problem with these nonstandard parts is that you can’t really expand unless you can get all of the same parts again - this is why I prefer backplanes with those easier to find connectors in the pic I posted - you can add as many of those as you like to standard PSUs and easily available controllers.
Well, before Chia was well known these were only $200 with 24 caddies and 2x IOM6 controllers. EBay server “junk sellers” caught on to the Chia trend and started scalping quickly.
with 3.3 PB, still you are thinking to join the pool ? May I know what is your expected days of wining now ? should be less than 3 days , I think ?
Just bought a 4243 with IOMs + 2*PSU including 24 2TB drives with Caddy for €400 from ebay.de
‘should be’, but never is. Last block took 9 days to find, which I guess is within the statistical probability range. But once every 3 days? I wish. It is never that frequent.
Finally got my stuff sorted a bit. Guess I have to start calling it a hobby now 
Also I learned from Chia: never ever ever trow away any computer cables…I just bought a dvi cable, something I had forgotten even existed.
Yep. There is a reason I have boxes upon boxes of salvage computer hardware from my last job sitting both in my shed and in my office. I even have my old AMD A8 (FM2 platform) computer that I can build back if needed.
