When is it time to switch to a harvester?

Chia Farming & Harvesting
1

Hi guys!

I apologize if this question has already been asked as I did not see anything when I quickly looked. But when (or how many plots) is it time to switch over to a harvester model?

I currently have 1,350~ plots being farmed on one machine running the GUI on Ubuntu. This machine does nothing but farming. I have 7 external Hard Drives and 4 regular drives connected, and then the rest of the drives are connected via a NetApp array (24 drives). I’m plotting now to setup a second NetApp array, but when is it time to use a harvester? I don’t see too many errors on my logs (just a few maybe once a day saying a slow challenge time, the rest of the errors are those odd connection errors every now and then).

Is there a rough plot count where that is too many to handle on one machine, or is it a matter of when the challenge times begin to be a problem? I could easily hook up another 2 more disk arrays to my farmer, but should I be doing that is the question.

Thanks in advance!

2

Whenever a harvester model is more convenient or makes more sense than your existing setup? Pretty sure it’s entirely optional.

3

Id say, u need a harvester, when u cannot attach more disks to ur machine and ur NAS doesnt respond fast enough for chia.

Or in other words, if u need to run multiple machines, the harvester-model prevents network-problems, that can occur, when u run multiple full nodes.

Security can also be a concern with multiple full nodes, but meh…

4

Thanks for the replies! I guess I won’t worry about a harvester until (or if) I ever run into an issues. Seems to be running good for now with maybe only 1 or 2 log entries a day for slow responses, which I am fine with.

5

to share with you my story, when I my farm reach over 1000 plots on local HDD plus 1500+ plus on a NAS all connect to one farming machine, it is way to slow of responding time ,which over 5 seconds often.

So later I change to the structure of one main farming machine + 2 harvesters, each holds around 1000 + plots ,and it works fine now.