Hi,
Wanting a pure chia farming rig where i can move my Windows Disk volume over for lowest possible farming power consumption.
I’ve using an Adaptec RAID 71605 to host all the Hard drives for the windows volume and want to move everything to a low powered PC that will support the RAID Controller Card and hard disks.
Can anyone recommend a low power PC that will handle the Adaptec card and connected 9x Hard drives?
Thanks
I cannot directly answer but I will share an experience. I swapped my farmer machine from a Dell R515
(12LFF bay) with attached netapp disk array (24 lff bay) for a Supermicro 847 with 36 LFF bays in an attempt to reduce power consumption.
It is running windows 10 bare metal with one VM within windows with my flax setup on it. During file copying I have been missing challenges and showing long response times, so even the supermicro with dual E5-2620s does not perform all that well as a harvester with 1300 plots on its SAS drives when it is copying from another machine over 1gbps lan and running one VM. It only has 16gb ram but showing 4GB unused.
I am investigating why this is, but do not underspec your harvester, especially solo farming, missing the block you should have won could be a costly mistake to save a little on electricity. Pooled the effect is much reduced, as a little poor points performance or stales occasionally isnt a big deal.
That’s pretty much to be expected when copying/writing to the disks, it’s the disk IO that is the bottle neck.
I have a mATX board with an i5-6400T which is 4 core with 8GB of ram, and an SSD for my Nicehash mining rig, power consumption without GPU is about 16w idle and 50w under a stress test. I would think that kind of setup would be fine for Chia, obviously no good for plotting.
I did wonder if a mini pc would be an issue.
If purely farming, it should be less intense, but I’ve removed the plotting drives and with 9 hard drives it’s still pulling around 130 watts.
Not solo farming, I’m on a pool
I need it to be less. Any other suggestions?
Sry, but with 9 drives, id recommend using a pi.
Mine has 8 drives and draws 62w.
If ur using raid and need that card, pi wont work of course.
Thanks.
How else can I connect the entire windows volume to a pi? The 9 drives are all sata drives connected to an adapter controller.
Would the volume still work if taken off the adapter controller and connected to a pi a different way?
Happy to try other stuff, any suggestions welcome. I don’t have any spare drives, so need a solution to move the entire 9 drives over as a windows volume to a pi if that is possible.
Thanks
All the problems you have mentioned so far are due to that Win volume. Is there any reason that you would like to keep it as a volume, rather than split it into separate drives?
I would look at all those plots as basically tmp files, so any volume/RAID/whatever is just a limiting factor, as in the worst case (HD failure) you can plot new files within few days (basically faster than you get your drive replaced, if still under warranty, and much faster, if you need to go to a store a get a new one).
It would be much easier to move those drives/plots between different boxes / OSes (e.g., I am using Win harvester, but Ubuntu plotter that outputs new plots to locally attached NTFS formatted drives - and then just move those drives around).
Yes, but now, that he has this 9-disk-volume full,
how can he fix it? I dont think he has an equal amount of space left.
Im afraid, a low-power-pc is the only option, but as he cannot use a pi, because he needs pcie, its gonna cost more and save less power.
Sad story.
You can check Pi CM4 module with the baseboard that has PCIe slot. The only problem with this solution is availability of that module (last checked it was December). So, that is not a problem. It could be slow, as that is PCIe2, but should be enough for Chia (IMO).
As far as what mb will support that Adaptec card, any mb that has PCIe slot (potentially also v2) will do ()as long as the edge fits that slot - Pi has a short one), as the issue is usually just power from that slot, and it should be more than enough to drive any card.
As far as that volume, if it can be shrunk, then I would still try to get rid of it by looping shrinking and moving plots to that new empty space. Yes, that would be a painful process, but potentially less painful in the long run having to struggle with that volume (it would be already done, if started when this thread was first written).
I just checked that Adaptec board on Amazon. It has a full length slot, so will not fit that Pi expansion board 
By the way, what RAID that volume is?
My understanding is that when you do RAID natively (through the card setup), that RAID is kind of bound to that card, or rather controller on that card. So, in case that card will die, you may be SOL, if you don’t have an exact spare card on hand. However, saying that, if you take that card with your drives and move it to some other box, it should be a seamless move (as long as that new box can use the format on that RAID volume).
I know that adapter, but would not recommend that as a solution here, as I simply dont know, if it will work.
Arm linux pcie 2x… Im dont wanna be responsible for that experiment 
I would like to try it myself, though. It could be a really nice solution to handle a harvester with 20-40 SATA drives (as you said, if it works).