I just received an old computer for free. It is from about 2007. I got it home and updated it to windows 10 immediately (was windows XP) I went through and see it has a dual core, 2 gb DDR2, with a 80 gb hd. I just bought a 120gb ssd, 4 gb ddr2, which should ship soon. Am I going to be able to farm on it? I have 16 drives on 3 USB hubs that have their own power.
That will perform worse than a Raspberry Pi 4, which is considered minimum spec - so probably not.
Landfill. More trouble than it is worth
What dual core cpu? in fact what motherboard/desktop to see what options are available?
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RPi3/4 are considered minimum spec, only when used as a full node with dbs on a slow SD card. There is no problem to use even RPi3 as a harvester, and RPi4 as a full node, when db is migrated to an SSD. Potentially the same with that box. Also, I think that Flex farmer should run fine on it.
Although, landfill is also a good option.
@ChiaBeast
Foxconn g33m02. I do not know the CPU… I would have to turn it on to find out, and not able to at the moment.
That mobo has only usb 2.0 ports. Having 16 drives in USB enclosures I suspect those to be usb 3.0.
USB is downward compatible but it will be on (or beyond) the limit for response times from the drives.
Plotting those drives with this system is out of the order.
As the (much) bigger investment is in the HDD’s already I would not risc any future chia wins by using this as a farmer, for free or not.
Of course a usb 3.0 adapter can be installed (pci express slots x16 and x1 available) but even then…
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I would ensure that the response times are under 5 seconds
If people are using a PI-4 to farm I don’t see why not you can’t use that. You have to try right…
This just a guess, but farming seems to take next to no CPU power to perform.
Whenever I have checked the “start_farmer.exe” process, in Task Manager, it always reads 0% CPU usage.
For the “start_harvester.exe” process, it ping-pongs between 0% CPU usage and 1% CPU usage.
So I would imagine that just about any computer should be capable of farming and harvesting.
But I am using much more powerful hardware that is plotting, too. But even so, I would think that a system with far less processing power should be able to do what my system claims uses next to nothing in resources?
I would use your old computer for farming, and see what happens. You have nothing to lose, and you will get your answer.
Check the debug log, and look for warnings for long response times.
If there are warnings, and they are derived from the old computer, then scratch the old computer.
If there are no warnings, then have a beer.
I couldn’t achieve this in windows 10 with 3gb ddr2 ram and 2 core 64 bit intel CPU. It never sync. CPU always %100
I am giving it a shot now. I’ll update ya’ll and let you know how it goes.
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I’m interested in seeing how it plays out.
I’ve always been a fan of seeing how much we can squeeze out of old hardware. You can start disabling unnecessary Microsoft services that run in the background or at least limit them to not run as often. Disable Cortana etc.
The biggest challenge with that will be the initial sync. If you have blockchain db on another computer, use that one. If not, maybe download the latest from https://www.chia-database.com/
Also, I would reduce the number of peers to 10 or 20, as that is where the db load comes from.
If you will be able to fully sync, the rest potentially will be not a big deal.
Well, the issue I have right now is that it came with a 90 GB hard drive, and Im about 5 gb short from being able to transfer the db files over… So, no big deal, just get another drive, right? Well, I copied a 480gb SSD with windows, but it won’t boot. Nothing but the original hd will boot… not sure why. I am trying to figure it out at the moment.
Not sure what you mean by “copied.” You cannot just “copy” one Win drive into another for several reasons. The best bet is to do Win USB installation stick on another box, and just run installer on that SSD (wipe out everything you have there during the install process).
Sure you can… I used Macrium and copied my SSD to my NVME and put it on another computer before.
Something else I just seen was the old computer has something that looks just like a SATA connection, but it is called something like CGE. So I got a SATA cord and now I have connections. But I will try a fresh install of windows, good idea.
No worries, that is just more like semantics. Macrium is basically cloning your original drive, and fixing the issues that normal copy cannot do. That is the reason that I said that I don’t know what you did as far as copying.
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I am not clear on this.
Why would a PC that does only farming need to be synced?
I thought that only the Full Node PC needs to be synced, and that satellite farmer/harvester systems just report their findings on challenges to the Full Node PC?
Or is @cjd9153 planning to use that old PC as his Full Node PC for all of his farming/harvesting?
Uhm, well how do we define “farming?” 
To me, farming means the full node (thus syncing), where harvesting is just harvesting. Sure, you can remove farmer from the full node, but I am not sure whether anyone is doing that.