3 PCs
Win 10 i5 - My main PC and only to be used for intermittent plotting.
Ubuntu 20 i5 desktop - 12gb mem - To be the main plotter/ farmer
Ubuntu 20 i3 laptop - 6gb mem - To be a supplemental plotter
I starting plotting on an i5 win 10 Laptop via USB drives about 2 weeks ago. Once I had enough information to be dangerous, and about 10 lost plots :-), I also started plotting in parallel on 2 other PCs, both i3’s running Ubuntu.
I want to make the i5 desktop the main plotter harvester set up on a bench in the basement. The i3 Laptop will also be doing supplemental plotting but firing the plots to the i5 desktop PC drives via network when complete.
From time to time I may use the i5 win 10 laptop to plot to odd time to plot.
Anyways
After getting everything straight (Drives, installs, memory sticks etc etc) I had 6 Win 10 plots, 3 Ubuntu on one PC and 2 plots on the other Ubuntu PC. 11 total.
Issue: All of the plots have been moved to the i5 desktop. They are acknowledged, and state they are “Syncing”.
I read that this syncing can be sped up syncing considerably if I take the contents of the .chia\mainnet\db and .chia\mainnet\wallet\db on my Windows i5 machine and move the contents to the i5 desktop? Am I reading that correctly? I don’t want to kill these plots after killing off so many others with newbie mistakes.
Or should I just sit tight and lets the plots sync on their own? They have been syncing for the past 2 days - Even the 2 finished since my main win 10 i5 PC stopped running Ghia
Note 1: The Win 10 i5 machine has not run Chia for the past 2 days as I seem to read that if there are multiple GUI of Chia in my home network it also complicates things as the GUI loads the wallet as well.
Note 2: All PCs are logged in to the GUI with my 24 key word.
yes, you can copy those folders to bring the new pc instantly to the state/height of the older pc.
Not sure at which height ur different PCs are, but its shown in the GUI.
Its very important to stop chia before copying the folders and personally, I always reboot, to make sure the files are not open anymore.
If you use MadMax plotter, you don’t need Chia installation on that computer at all. So, your Win i5 and i3 laptop don’t really need it. Also, MadMax is much faster than Chia plotter. There is really no point right now to use Chia plotter.
When you start plotting on your laptop, just monitor temperatures. I also tried to use my i5 laptop, but gave up, as it was just too slow (mobile CPU) and too hot.
The best investment that you can do is to beef up one of your i5 boxes, potentially the one that has a newer CPU, and use that one for all plotting.
I just plan to hobby farm - with the assorted PCs I see 2 to 4 a day - This could give me 1,000 or so by this time next year.
Right now I am in for $400 (two 5tb USB drives and some other parts) so if I get something (e.g. one coin) in the next year that will be OK for me. I will add USB drives as needed - The I5 desktop has 6 USB ports.
Be careful, when you decide what USB drives to purchase. All 3.5" drives draw about 6-8W, so you can save a bit on electricity getting a 10TB drives. Also, less cables to run around. On the other hand, 2.5" drives have shorter lifespan, so there is a potential, that they will start failing faster, thus higher cost per TB. Also, those drives are not really meant to run 24/7, so they tend to run hot. I also purchased some USB drives, and ended up ripping apart one side to have them run colder (about 5-8C temp drop - not that much). Although, I intend to shuck them all, to further lower their temps.
I would consider upgrading your Win i5 to 64GB RAM. Then when plotting (MadMax) splitting temp folders to temp1 and temp2. Then install PrimoCache, give it about 50GB RAM, and set it to cache temp2 folder only. I think that setup would give you the biggest speed increase with whatever you have right now. I assume that you run your plotter on a SSD/NVMe right now, though.
RE: Drives: USB drives came about by Price only - $114CDN on sale - A 3.5" 8TB is still $250+ regular price, pulse the case on top. There is a sale for $220 each today for 3.5 8TB, but I don’t need them yet. . (Great white North prices)
I probably will open the cases for cooling, that’s for sure.
Re Memory - It is an older PC - I bet 32GB is max for that Chassis - Same with the plotting drive - It is a run of the mill 2tb SATA 3.5" drive.
Sure I may jump in with a better SSD drive in the short term and in the new year but I might drop more into it - $300 for a good Enterprise SSD, another $300 for board and processor and then another $200 on Memory - Just for mining - A bit too much for now. I have other hobbies to waste that money on…
Update: I did the transfer over - The wallet is syncing - has been for over 2 hours now - I will let it spin overnight.
If I open the Win 10 laptop PC , full node view (Which has no plots, nor any plots attached to farm) I see the 10 plots on the current i5 desktop PC and they all are just flopping over now from “Finished” to “Unfinished” randomly with a current time stamp. So it looks like some background syncing is occurring.
Re: Drives - I would suspect Canada is a second tier market for drives and with the current IC shortage I would guess we are getting squeezed - Maybe in a few months will ease up - For now I need to fill some drives first before getting my drive pool to big.