That was fun, or was it?

Made a few plots, started looking at how much time would be invested, how much computer wear and tear, and looking at how fast the network space is growing. I realized, I have a life, I have a job, and this is stupid. I’m out. Deleted my plots, freed up my space and installed some fresh SSDs back into my gaming rig. If you crazies are serious about it. Get on ebay and buy yourself a SAS chassis with 24 bays for $150 bucks. Then buy a lot of 1-3TB SAS drives for about $400 bucks. No one is buying the SAS drives because last time I checked they are not SATA compatible. Get yourself a used fibre channel card for a few hundred bucks for the SAS bay, and mine two plots in parallel on each drive. I don’t even think you would need to stagger them. Don’t use a RAID, just use JBOD. As your drives fill up swap them out to a larger capacity drives and convert them to a RAID5 farm for protection. I analyzed the plotting process on different settings, and I think there is something in the code to intentionally slow the plotting process. Just my 2-cents.

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Im running my whole farm and plotters on old server hardware, jbods with sas drives as storage and even sas drives in raid 0 at the plotters, works Great

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They’ve held cash prizes in the past to optimize the plotter. No one really found a faster way at the time. If you can find a way to make it faster I’m sure there would be some financial incentive to share it. Either from the chia team or private individuals.

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I definitely feel like old decommissioned server hardware is the way to go for the best “bang for the buck” on chia work. Especially since there’s not a lot of dropoff in plotter performance as you go back in Intel chip generations… even all the way back to 2nd gen (Sandy Bridge, 2011) people are posting some decent plot times! If you can add fast enough disks, and a bunch of cores even old cores, you’re in business.

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