I’m well aware of numa node performance, but I don’t need to spend $500-600 to slightly increase my plot production.
For me it was 33%. But depends what you call slightly. 
Just wondering if you tried reformatting the drive? maybe even full format, not quick format
My solution to many troubles has been: format and/or re-install stuff, tends to do a wonderful job of resetting everything to normal.
In any case 70% health should not give any problem, my are much lower atm 
That being said, that nvme is a bad drive for plotting (low sustained write speed) which is why you where getting 70 minute plots in the first place instead of 25-30 minutes you should be getting with that cpu+ram. Add a 256GB nvme with good sustained write for temp 2 drive and you’ll be much happier
my setup with 5900X ,16G RAM, 2 NVME 2T as temp & temp 2 ,in windows by using MM with result of 35 minutes… So even 70 min is not reasonable ,from what I can tell.
What SSD did you use for temp driver ?
My 5900X + 64GB DDR-3000 takes 45mins on my 960 pro and 30mins on my 980 pro.
.\chia_plot.exe -n 1 -r 22 -t H:\TempFiles\ -d J:\Plots\ -w -p XXXXX -f XXXXX
The disk used as temp is the low performing SSD. The rest are Western Digital 12TB Red HDD.
So, if I understood everything right so far, the options I have are:
- Buying more RAM to have a total of 128gb (ramdisk)
- Buying a better performing SSD like a 970/980 Evo to use as temp disk.
If I went the ramdisk way, should I buy a 256gb SSD with better performance too? Or can I keep using the one I have right now?
Also, I already performed a TRIM on the SSD to no effect.
Thanks again for the responses.
besides all the beef about the RAMDISK between those two, I suspect that your ssd is fried… Mad Max without ramdisk should be around 45 mins aprox. With ramdisk ( having 128 gb of RAM so you could create a 119 gb ramdisk) it should be around 30 minutes or so.
I personally had trouble with Ryzen 5950X where i got no consistent core usage from it… so i returned and changed for a i9 10900K (this was BEFORE madmax). It was my first ryzen build and got very dissapointed but i lost too much time on that system. With i9 i had no issues - YES I KNOW much lower performance cpu but at least i got a consistent and reliable system.
Again, i think that your ssd is toast… when you try to open disk manager and crashes … thats an indicator that it has trouble with one of the disks.( IMHO)
run a CrystalDisk on that drive to see the actual TBW and to see the health… Also you could do a crystalMark for the performance test…
Usually drives last 2x of what they TBW are marketed ( at least it happened consistently with some WD SN750 Black and some Inland Platinum…) even at 100% health my WD Blacks were plotting at 0.75 the usual speed ( i usually plotted 8 plots in parallel in about 8 hours… then it fell to 13 /14 hs… - that is when I realized i´ve had written 1100TBW when the manufacturer TBW was 600 )
You better go with adding more RAM route since MadMax only writes 25% of data to SSD when using with ramdisk (assuming that you will use SSD for -t and ramdisk for -2).
Besides the performance benefit, you also lower your plotting cost because you can plot on ramdisk forever without having to consider TBW as you would with SSD.
Problems like these are so hard to diagnose with just hardware specs. All we can offer is best guesses and personal experience.
The curious thing is why the performance is dropping off when there is no obvious reason why it would.
Could it be disk wear?
Unlikely. Drive seems to be in adequate health.
How can you check this?
Check disk health with SMART diagnostic tools and see if there are any errors, or, replace it with another drive (preferably of the same make a model to reduce variance) and see if the problem continues.
Crashes could be either software or hardware related or both.
If its hardware you could try re-seating components you think are suspect, like re-seating ram, moving nvme drive to another port and see if there is an improvement in system stability. (Although I have my doubts that this your issue)
Is there adequate cooling?
Some components may thermal-throttle where it slows down performance to protect it from reaching excessive temperatures. Sometimes a system may hang or crash because a component has turned itself off to protect itself from a excessive heat.
Install hardware monitoring tools like hwinfo64 to check your temperatures, is your CPU properly cooled? Is your NVME drive overheating? If so, install proper cooling devices, heatsinks, fans, and see if it improves system stability.
Could it be a software issue?
Now we’re really getting into the murky depths.
You can ignore the mention that madmax needs a ramdisk. For optimal performance yes, but for us lesser mortals you can just use an nvme drive, ssd, hdd, madmax will just run at whatever maximum bandwidth your system allows, getting the maximum performance out of your configuration. What is doesn’t explain is the drop in performance you’re experiencing.
If there is a memory leak you’ll see a steady increase in ram usage until its full, at which point your system may slow to crawl or completely hang. A reboot would clear the problem temporarily until the problem occurs again.
If there is a bug in the software, then you could try re-installing or upgrading the software. Also check to see if other people are experiencing the same problem.
You could also try running a different operating system if you’re feeling brave. Sounds like you’re a windows user, you could try running it in Linux, if your system still isn’t stable there it is likely to be a hardware issue.
As you can see from this excessively long post, trying to narrow down the problem is a process of ruling things out in a systematic way… and I’m sure it could be something I forgot to mention entirely. But hopefully its one of these things. I wish you good luck
Additionally:
- Check that your NVME drive isn’t full of temp files leftover from previous failed plots.
- Check that trim is enabled (it sould be, but check anyway)
- I’ll add more stuff here when I think of it lol.
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