Sold my plot PC, and now full-time harvesting on raspberry

Chia Farming & Harvesting
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Raspberry is an ultimate solution for long term mining chia. I sold my plotting PC for cash and invest more hard-drives. Realized that plotting speed is not king, free HDD space is.

Spent sometime figure out how to install Ubuntu server on raspberry pi 4b (8Gb version). It serve as my full node machine and 128G micro SD card should be pretty much for next two year I think.

I’m buying plots from cloud services. Something around $1 per plot would be just fine. Consider plotting myself with all costs… especially the room temperature, lol. Found a provider where I saw it’s just $0.3/plot on Chia Supply. I am getting 3TB a day due to my internet speed. Guess I will ask them to lower it to 2TB (or 1TB) a day to sync with my HDD purchase speed:)

Raspberry is awesome! With a 16-port USB hub and hard-drive cables, it’s good to go. I would recommend using just USB 2.0 cable instead. It’s cheaper and the bandwidth fits. Lots of fun I must say :smiley:

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I was harvesting on the Pi 4Gb and saw lots of alerts on memory usage, so I just picked up an 8gb. I have 9 drives hung off of it on USB with no issues so far.

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Watch your proof speed. My Pi on SD card wasn’t fast enough to run full node, plus farmer for remote harvesters. Consider running the os on USB 3

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I tried on a Raspberry Pi 4B 4GB, but ended up having errors after connecting more than 8 drives on my 16-port USB hub (Acasis). What hub are you using, and have you connected more than 8 drives yet?

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I read that the Rock pi 4 is better for harvesting. I can manage 32 disks using 2x16 sabrent USB hubs.

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Same Acasis here. Have you use AC adapter for your hard drives? (or you’re using 2.5 inch’s)

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Rock pi is amazing. Can easily mount 5 HDD on with high speed.

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You can also attach a disk enclosure with a pcie LSI SAS/SATA HBA to get a bunch of disks…
The 4 lane pcie gen 2 seem quite powerful for such use cases.

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Did anyone manage to have more than 15-20 external hdds on raspberry pi 4 8gb?

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I use one big 12v power supply that I use to supply all of the disks’ USB3 adapters, as well as the Acasis (I originally used their power supply, which worked fine, but wanted to reduce the number of things plugged in, and calculated that my 12v power supply could handle the load with no issues, so have the Acasis also plugged in to the 12v power supply). You can see the setup here:

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So, yes, I am using 3.5" disks, and yes I am powering them separately from the USB connection.

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Then ultimate solutions for farming is a server rack that uses 100% of the space and makes sure the drives are adequately cooled so they do not break down.

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