These were exactly my thoughts when I first started going down the chia rabbit hole. I absolutely needed a portable solution for my needs, but my concerns over the Pi setups started confirming the more I read. Striking a balance between cost, power efficiency, raw horsepower and portability was definitely challenging!
The Raspberry Pi systems are awesome as I owned them in the past, but they aren’t really designed for this type of usage after maybe a few drives lol.
I should say that my experience is purely anecdotal…I’m not all that clear on what determines my particular luck. It wouldn’t stand to reason that harvesters can’t create plots and check for proofs at the same time, especially given that I’ve always had plenty of plots passing the filter, and my response times are all well below 2 seconds…most under 0.1 seconds. Gotta love mini-SAS.
Nor do I lose sync during the dust storms. From the looks of it, my node attracts many connections and it appears I’m helping numerous others keep their sync.
Perhaps there’s something in my setup inhibiting wins while plotting? Maybe. If there is, I’ll find it eventually.
Giving up? Never.
So it’s been about 3 weeks, how happy have you been with the estimated time to win so far? We don’t need specifics as I am assuming most of us will never reach these milestones, but just curious.
Happy AND lucky lol - my TTW is sitting around 6 days but I have won 6 times in the last 3 weeks - 5 from my NFT plots and 1 from my OG plots. Of COURSE I’d be pooling when I’m getting lucky lol. As soon as I go solo on those NFT plots I’ll probably go weeks without winning lol.
Either way, still totally within (or a bit ahead) of probable payout, so I’m confident everything is working correctly at least!
Hi,
Great project you got going!
I have a couple of questions you might be able to help me with. I have 4 SC200’s I am currently running.
Do you know the max number of 200’s chained together per server?
Also, I have purchased a 5 SC200 without drives and tried to add 2 SATA drives into it but they are not being recognized. Any ideas why I am not able to see SATA on my SC200.
Thanks for any input!
No but I believe it is limited by your SAS controller card, not by the SC200’s. They just pass the SAS connection through their daisy chain ports. I’ve connected up to 10 of them in a daisy chain to a single SAS port and the host can still see all 120 drives.
That is strange, mine have recognized every drive I’ve put in them whether they are SATA or SAS and in sizes ranging from 400GB up to 18TB. Are you sure the drives themselves are good? Do you need to “initialize” them in Disk Manager (Windows)?
Well, I thought the drives are good but I will double-check them again with 2 others I know for sure are good.
The SAS card I am running is a Dell H200E do you think the SAS card could restrict it from seeing the drives?
Could be? I’m definitely not a SAS expert, I’ve just learned a lot myself the last few months. At first I was using an LSI 9200 2 port external SAS card but now I’m using HP blade servers and the HP blade chassis SAS ports. Both have worked just fine for me!
So the Dell R610 has the SAS controller that connects to all the SC200 chassis above, What are you running on the R610 Windows or Linux?
Well after some work today I have discovered I had 2 dead drives. Not sure how I got these mixed in with my good stack but with as many as I have now LOL. I installed another good SATA today and mixed with a SAS and can confirm it is working. I am running a Dell H200E. Thanks for the suggestion @enderTown
enderTown do your SC200’s with none Dell drives leave the activity lights solid green?
I wanna be the very best
Like no one ever was
To plot them is my real test
[To farm them is my cause]
[I will travel across Newegg -
Searching far and wide]
[Teach Farmers to understand
The Chia that’s inside]
[Chorus]
[(Chia!, gotta catch 'em all!)]
It’s you and me
I know it’s my destiny
[(Chia!)]
[Oh, you’re my best friend]
[In a world we must defend]
[(Chia!, gotta catch 'em all)]
A crypto so true
[Our carbon credits will pull us through]
[You teach me and I’ll teach you]
[Chiaaa! (Gotta farm’em all) Gotta farm’em all]
Yeah
Adapted from
I’ve noticed different LED behavior with different drives for sure - some drives will leave the light on solid and some will leave it off. But in both cases they will flicker on/off with activity at least. Might be a drive firmware thing? Not sure but it doesn’t seem to affect anything so I haven’t worried about it.
Little follow-up, realized I had my local harvester reading my slowest network drive, which may or may not have been affecting my overall time. I moved that drive to one of the remote harvesters, and the results were pretty much immediate, and have been consistent since.
But I also Feng-Shui’d the apartment. So it could be that.
Do you have 2 servers connected to your SC200’s via SAS cables? If so do both servers access the disks the same?
Thanks,
Neo81179
You talk about “local auctions” that aren’t ebay. What auctions are you talking about? I’ve never really heard of “local auctions”.
Also, how much electricity would you estimate you’re expending per TB or PB of plots? I’m almost concerned you’re spending a bit more than would be expected from external drives by comparison.
Before the internet and Craigslist we used to go down to a sleezy warehouse every week for an auction of their dumpster dived products. 
I assume in some places their still ongoing.
How does one find these “sleezy [sic] warehouse[s]”?
One needs to be located in Northern California, aka Bay Area, to find deals like that
No, but that is indeed possible and is used for automatic fail-over scenarios. I don’t really have a need for this with Chia as I don’t need guaranteed 100% uptime and a redundant fail-over server would just be extra watts.
I’m not totally sure yet, I’ve got to measure all of that. It is definitely not the most power-efficient setup but it keeps all the drives super happy with plenty of power and cool air and anti-vibration so that is worth something. Also we have some of the cheapest electric in the nation here in Oklahoma since we are an energy-producing state - 7-8c/kWh. I keep waiting for all the cryptobros to realize this and start moving here. 
Lol yes a few of my auctions have been of the local sleezy variety but mostly I still just google them. If you know the equipment you want, google it with “auction” and sometimes you’ll run across public surplus auctions. These are big orgs or even states that are going through their normal upgrade cycles and they need to get rid of their old equipment. Of course, you are taking some big risks because you usually just have grainy pictures to look at and then if it is remote, you also must pay freight charges on top of your winning bid. Here’s an example - my home state of Oklahoma has an auction that runs every week. I’ve gotten all kinds of cool stuff from this one! But they don’t ship - you have to be close to OKC to be able to pick it up yourself. DCS Surplus Auction (ok.gov)
Also, quick update: just hit 1.5PB!
