I’m shutting down my farm due to moving soon. I never posted a picture here so I thought I would do so now.
Over the last year the farm has been operationally breakeven in the summer and slightly profitable in the winter at $0.12/kwh (USA - mountain west). The farm is effective ~7pb, mostly C30 plots.
I’ve farmed since launch. In terms of my overall investment I’m profitable until you factor in time investment due to re-plotting, etc. Setup and management probably took me longer as I do not have a background in IT. One thing I wish I’d done sooner was switching everything to 220V which I did about a year ago.
That’s a nice looking rack of disks! How did the move go? Up and running again?
You mentioned cost of electricity at $0.12/kwh, but not cost of disks nor cost of setting up that nice rack. So I did a quick back-of-envelope. I don’t know when you started farming, but back around when mainnet went live, the hotness in disks were 20TB models, with the sweet spot in dollars/terabyte being 16TB models at roughly $20/TB. (I paid $26/TB for mine.) With 16TB models, you’d need 438 of them to make a 7pb farm and it’d cost you in the ballpark of $128,000.
I don’t know how many disks you can connect to a single server, nor what the cost of those servers are. I can guess; but I will leave that estimate out for the time being.
For electricity, those 438 drives at roughly 4 watts each would consume 42kwh/day or roughly $5/day at $0.12/kwh. Those 7PB should farm about 5 XCH/day, or $15/day at current prices.
Now if drive warranties are 5 years for enterprise drives, and you extend the recommended replacement interval from 3 years out to 10 (data center operators would give you “that look”), then the depreciation cost comes out to 128000/10yr/365day or about $35/day. I therefore calculate $15farm - $5elec - $35disk = a loss of ($25)/day. Calculated another way, to break even, the price of XCH would need to be at or above $8 assuming net-space is just below 6EB.
My calculation, above, magically assumes the cost of the rack, power supplies, servers, RAM, GPUs and so on is zero, which is obviously not true. And those things depreciate with a useful lifespan roughly equal to the disks themselves. They also draw significant electrical current, possibly equal to all the attached disks.
