Any one looked at Chia yet?

[draksia]

I just had a buddy mention that he is worried about SSD shortages due to Chia mining. Has one looked at setting that up yet?

 

[Gigantopithecus]

I am skeptical it will become widespread for three reasons:
1. Entry cost is higher than ETH's was before GPU prices skyrocketed.
2. It is MUCH more complicated to set up than ETH mining.
3. Profitability is a total unknown at this point.
But who knows, right? DOGE was a joke until it was not a joke.

 

[draksia]

For sure those are all valid points.

18TB drives are all pretty much gone already.

I picked a couple of 12TB external for the lowest cost per TB and starting to set it up

 

[Andrew_Carr]

Interesting idea but it seems like it's centralized and I'm not sure what new problem it really solves (a better version of POW but what's the use case?). I wish we could have decentralized storage already, so we could have an encrypted and decentralized version of dropbox or something.

 

[Strange bird]

For sure those are all valid points.

18TB drives are all pretty much gone already.

I picked a couple of 12TB external for the lowest cost per TB and starting to set it up

What is important for ssd mining, speed, higher capacity,m2,sata,nvme or?

 

[draksia]

What is important for ssd mining, speed, higher capacity,m2,sata,nvme or?

an SSD only matters for plotting, other than you want as much space as possible

 

[Strange bird]

an SSD only matters for plotting, other than you want as much space as possible

And speed of Internet, does it matter?

 

[draksia]

And speed of Internet, does it matter?

Doesn't seem like that matters either, it takes quite a while to do the plots though and they write a lot your SSD like 1.6TB for 101GB plot.

 

[Kardonxt]

I set this up just for fun on one of my GPU mining rigs using the cheap ssd it had and a 12tb external.

Setup is very easy if you aren't concerned with generating plots as fast as possible. Install the client, point it to an ssd you don't care about killing for plotting, and point it to a second HD to save completed plots to. You can do it all through the windows GUI. (You don't even have to use an ssd, you can use a spinner for plotting, it will just take a lot longer.)

If you want to get hardcore and generate plots as fast as possible to fill up hundreds of TB of data, then it can get quite expensive for a coin that currently has no value.

 

[lobstar]

I setup Chia yesterday on my server. Here is my finding so far:

• Plotting requires decent hardware: Each plot takes 2 threads minimum but 4 is better. Each plotting process takes about 4GB of ram.
• The wear on an SSD is IMMENSE. An SSD is basically required for parallel plotting (creating more than one plot at a time).
• Expect each plot to take about 10 - 12 hours.
• If plotting is interrupted you must start over on that plot.

I'm running this on my secondary machine which is a 3950x, 32gb ram, 3x 12TB WD Reds, 2x 10TB WD Reds, 1TB 980 PRO, 512GB 950 PRO

I've been given this article to help tune plotting. https://thechiafarmer.com/2021/04/21/optimizing-plotters-in-windows/

Once you are done plotting I don't think you need much hardware.

 

[draksia]

I found this guide pretty helpful for getting as many plots going as possible.

https://thechiafarmer.com/2021/04/21/optimizing-plotters-in-windows/

 

[lilfiend]

I've been plotting since just before mainnet launched.

Parallel plotting is better than trying to throw all your threads and ram at one plot. With the newer updates you only need like 260GB-ish of temp space per k32 plot. There are phases that can only use 2 threads and phases that can use more. Most people stagger their plots so they are in different phases as they are plotting. You can plot directly to HDD's, though you really want a lot of them to do that. Most people plot to SSD first with the final plot living on HDD's. Its very similar to burst where you plot once and read many times. If you plot now you are plotting for solo mining. If you don't have a lot of space and a fast plotting setup I'd just wait for pools as you'll have to replot to join a pool. This is a headache I am not looking forward to as I currently only plot at about 1.3TB/day and I don't plan on investing $$$ on a coin with no value yet.

Ignore all the old posts about disabling bitfield for plotting, the new bitfield plotting is the fastest way to do it and reduces total writes to the temp drive.

I've heard total writes are anywhere from 1.2TB to 1.8TB, assuming 1.6TB is accurate to get a 101GB plot you're looking at about 115TB of writes per 8TB hard drive (7.27TB usable, 72 plots). A Sabrent Rocket 2tb TLC NVME ssd has 3115TB of write endurance or about 1900 plots / 190TB you can plot before killing the ssd.

 

[lobstar]

I'm unable to plot as fast as the network is growing ...

 

[lilfiend]

I'm unable to plot as fast as the network is growing ...

View attachment 351078

yeah i was able to keep up until a few days ago when it really started growing. Its a real shame.... Pool mining needs to be prioritized as small farmers are going to be hurt the most by all these big farmers joining.

 

[Cypher-]

I've been having some fun with this. My 'homelab' is rather absurd so I have some resources to play with. I figure I'm getting into this pretty late so I'm not looking to throw money at it and I wanted to see what I can do with what I have.

I have a spare MD1200 full of 2TB drives that is turned off. My main NAS is using a MD1200 with 12x6TB drives and I have 17TB free. Putting my largest drives lying around into my spare MD1200 would let me spin up an extra 32TB of free storage so I've got some space I could use. The issue then becomes plotting.

My ESXi server has 192GB of memory and 32 cores so I can allocate a bunch of that, but what I don't have is a bunch of SSDs I'm willing to destroy. What's annoying is I have a 280GB optane drive that has like 17PB write endurance but it's not clear if one plot will fit on it. I do have two 500GB drives in raid 0 that I'm willing to sacrifice so I started there, but obviously I wanted more. I have a 40Gb connection between my ESXi server and my FreeNAS box (which is where my MD1200s are hooked to) so I started wondering if I could get away with making some raid0 arrays of 2TB drives and plotting to a network share. It turns out 4 2TB drives in raid0 is getting me 500MB/s writes. It's taking about 9 hours per plot using spinning storage on a completely different box. This wont last forever though since eventually I'm going to need the storage to store plots.

The other issue is that FreeNAS doesn't do JBOD, so either I need to look at virtualizing something like Unraid or do a dozen one drive raid0 pools. I'm still working out what I want to do.

I have an opportunity to pick up some really beefy servers from work (56 cores, 768GB ram) which I was planning on getting before I even heard about Chia, but I'm now thinking ramdisks would make nice plotting drives Just waiting on pricing.

 

[draksia]

yeah i was able to keep up until a few days ago when it really started growing. Its a real shame.... Pool mining needs to be prioritized as small farmers are going to be hurt the most by all these big farmers joining.

Yeah I can do 8 plots in parallel but its 15 hours or so, that makes it really hard to keep up.

I needed to start two weeks ago.

 

[lobstar]

If it makes anyone feel better I've done 8.3 TB of plotting and only taken 6% of the life of my 980 Pro and 2% off my 950 Pro.

 

[melk]

That sounds like a lot of processing power that could crunch real world scientific data. You guys ever hear of boinc? or grid coin?

 

[lobstar]

That sounds like a lot of processing power that could crunch real world scientific data. You guys ever hear of boinc? or grid coin?

Only plotting uses processing power. once you are done plotting it's just drive seeks.

 

[Gilthanis]

That sounds like a lot of processing power that could crunch real world scientific data. You guys ever hear of boinc? or grid coin?

Keep in mind that we have a distributed computing forum here. We have a team and would love for others here to join up as there is options with BOINC where you can also earn crypto and still be on the [H] team. Feel free to reach out to me for info.

 

[Gilthanis]

I'm having flashbacks to all the [H]'ers jumping on the BURST bandwagon back in 2017. Too bad that coin is pretty much dead now...

 

[Zeoclang]

Now that Burst has been mentioned, what advantage does Chia have over Burst besides being newer?

 

[Gilthanis]

Now that Burst has been mentioned, what advantage does Chia have over Burst besides being newer?

Development? LOL Honestly no idea other than it has a lot more interest right now. Last few times I looked back at BURST (as I'm still sitting on a few coins) they were still just making a lot of promises and hype.

 

[draksia]

Up to 87 plots and no chia yet. I am still working on optimization the plotting throughput.

 

[Noetic]

I trying my hand at Chia, buying into some overly hopeful crypto sites/. It takes to damned long to plot and chews through my SSDs. Cannot say it seems worth it.


There has to be a better way to set up HDs to run this program. It is like in the old days of setting up a Novell server.

 

[lobstar]

I trying my hand at Chia, buying into some overly hopeful crypto sites/. It takes to damned long to plot and chews through my SSDs. Cannot say it seems worth it.


There has to be a better way to set up HDs to run this program. It is like in the old days of setting up a Novell server.

You can pay someone to do it for you on the discord. Other than that, once it's plotted you never need to do it again. You can also get enterprise NVMEs that have huge durability.

 

[Noetic]

You can pay someone to do it for you on the discord. Other than that, once it's plotted you never need to do it again. You can also get enterprise NVMEs that have huge durability.

Thanks for the reply.

From what I am reading, indeed plotting takes up a great deal of time. It took days to get my first TB online, and I have at least 50 to go. The temp files on my ssds seem to be a limiter. I read that it writes a temp file 10 fold before copying to the HD. Is that part true? If so, especially with the complaints of poor XCH compensation, I'd this worth it?

D

 

[lilfiend]

If you're sub 1pb at this point you should be waiting for pool plotting, which is supposed to enable soon. You'll be able to plot pool ready plots before you join a pool and the plots aren't pool specific. Current plots are not able to to work in a pool, you'll have to replot.

They said pool ready plotting should enable in the next few days and pools will be enabled on the 17th.

You could join hpool but you have to fully trust them with your private key or a hash of it supposedly but you put your 24 word recovery phrase into a program they made to get the signature so.... You wouldn't have to replot and could start doing that today.

If you have a large number of hard drives and not much ssd space you might be able to plot to hard drives directly quicker than to ssd>hdd

 

[Noetic]

If you're sub 1pb at this point you should be waiting for pool plotting, which is supposed to enable soon. You'll be able to plot pool ready plots before you join a pool and the plots aren't pool specific. Current plots are not able to to work in a pool, you'll have to replot.

They said pool ready plotting should enable in the next few days and pools will be enabled on the 17th.

You could join hpool but you have to fully trust them with your private key or a hash of it supposedly but you put your 24 word recovery phrase into a program they made to get the signature so.... You wouldn't have to replot and could start doing that today.

If you have a large number of hard drives and not much ssd space you might be able to plot to hard drives directly quicker than to ssd>hdd

Thank you for the info Yeesh... 1PB.


How do you direct plot and is it much slower? I assume that it uses the HD for the temp files.

D

 

[noko]

Coin went up 67% already in 24 hours. So will this make storage as scarce as GPUs? Do not like the pre-mined, unknown number of current coins etc. Proof of space and time for blockchain verification seems odd but if it works and is cheap on power maybe good. Their plan to list on stock exchange, to get investors is also unique, skipping the ICO phase. I am just waiting for businesses to start seeing their storage space on their machines starting to disappear .

 

[Gilthanis]

Coin went up 67% already in 24 hours. So will this make storage as scarce as GPUs? Do not like the pre-mined, unknown number of current coins etc. Proof of space and time for blockchain verification seems odd but if it works and is cheap on power maybe good. Their plan to list on stock exchange, to get investors is also unique, skipping the ICO phase. I am just waiting for businesses to start seeing their storage space on their machines starting to disappear .

Any business worth a lick has their ports locked down and have detection services that watch for mining activities.

 

[lobstar]

Woo! Just an update to my previous post

 

[lilfiend]

Thank you for the info Yeesh... 1PB.


How do you direct plot and is it much slower? I assume that it uses the HD for the temp files.

D

Yeah just set temp directory to the same hard drive as final drive. Though I would keep temp files in different folder for easy clearing of files when plotter is interrupted.

A few people have stated that plotting to a non SMR drive takes about 20 hours. So you would need a lot of drives to compete with ssd speeds but you could probably over provision CPU quite a lot with hard drives.

Coin went up 67% already in 24 hours. So will this make storage as scarce as GPUs? Do not like the pre-mined, unknown number of current coins etc. Proof of space and time for blockchain verification seems odd but if it works and is cheap on power maybe good. Their plan to list on stock exchange, to get investors is also unique, skipping the ICO phase. I am just waiting for businesses to start seeing their storage space on their machines starting to disappear .

Hard drive prices are already up. Go on ebay and try to find $120 or even $150 8tb used drives. There are normally a bunch of listings with over 50 available but now its hard to find any 8tb+ drive in quantity. The premine is huge too, I think it will probably kill the value of the coin.

 

[legcramp]

Nice drives here with decent TBW, price, performance ratio, TLC. Raid these bad boys up and get plotting!

https://www.ebay.com/itm/373290341231

 

[legcramp]

If you're sub 1pb at this point you should be waiting for pool plotting, which is supposed to enable soon. You'll be able to plot pool ready plots before you join a pool and the plots aren't pool specific. Current plots are not able to to work in a pool, you'll have to replot.

They said pool ready plotting should enable in the next few days and pools will be enabled on the 17th.

You could join hpool but you have to fully trust them with your private key or a hash of it supposedly but you put your 24 word recovery phrase into a program they made to get the signature so.... You wouldn't have to replot and could start doing that today.

If you have a large number of hard drives and not much ssd space you might be able to plot to hard drives directly quicker than to ssd>hdd

Where do you get your daily CHIA news from? Thanks!

 

[lilfiend]

Where do you get your daily CHIA news from? Thanks!

Chia subreddit and watching the chia live streams.

 

[dreinertuwm]

Hi, I'm new to the forums and to Chia.

I have a few questions if anyone can help. I just took what I had and setup a miner pacing ~4 plots per day on a 1TB SSD and I have several external 8TB drives on Win 10. I've read several guides and watched videos but everything seems mostly based on initial start-up and SSD life awareness. Once I get it figured out a bit more I'll move to a Xeon PC I have with 12 cores, 24 threads, and 32GB ram to start speeding up plots.

I'm not sure I fully understanding the reward and longer term. It seems to me that the goal is to create as many plots as possible as soon as possible and put the completed plot files on open drives (ie: fill 100TB with plot files tomorrow). My thought is I'll fill the first 8TB with plots and months from now start filling the 2nd 8TB drive and once they are filled they are hanging out waiting to be a needed file.


My questions are...

1) The "profitability", if you will, is based on having all the storage filled with plot files, correct?
2) Is having ~100TB of drive space active really any benefit until I fill it? Thinking it doesn't make sense to have multiple external drives plugged in today if I'm not actually sending plot files to it for months.
3) Once all my 2 external 8TB drives are filled and assuming I don't buy any more storage am I still creating new plots? Does it all clear and restart if a Chia is awarded or is there any reason to re-write over them?
4) If one of the plots is needed does that 110GB plot file get "consumed" and I refill the space again?



I appreciate any feedback insights!

 

[lobstar]

Hi, I'm new to the forums and to Chia.

I have a few questions if anyone can help. I just took what I had and setup a miner pacing ~4 plots per day on a 1TB SSD and I have several external 8TB drives on Win 10. I've read several guides and watched videos but everything seems mostly based on initial start-up and SSD life awareness. Once I get it figured out a bit more I'll move to a Xeon PC I have with 12 cores, 24 threads, and 32GB ram to start speeding up plots.

I'm not sure I fully understanding the reward and longer term. It seems to me that the goal is to create as many plots as possible as soon as possible and put the completed plot files on open drives (ie: fill 100TB with plot files tomorrow). My thought is I'll fill the first 8TB with plots and months from now start filling the 2nd 8TB drive and once they are filled they are hanging out waiting to be a needed file.


My questions are...

1) The "profitability", if you will, is based on having all the storage filled with plot files, correct?
2) Is having ~100TB of drive space active really any benefit until I fill it? Thinking it doesn't make sense to have multiple external drives plugged in today if I'm not actually sending plot files to it for months.
3) Once all my 2 external 8TB drives are filled and assuming I don't buy any more storage am I still creating new plots? Does it all clear and restart if a Chia is awarded or is there any reason to re-write over them?
4) If one of the plots is needed does that 110GB plot file get "consumed" and I refill the space again?



I appreciate any feedback insights!

1. All that matters is plotted space. Number of plots makes no difference. There is a plot planner which will help you decide how many and of what size plots to most efficiently fill a drive.
2. One of the biggest bottlenecks is HDD write speed. You may be able to write to several drives at once instead of just one but overall a stagger solves the same problem for single HDD writes.
3. The beauty of chia is that you can stop plotting once your drives fill and you will still have a chance to win coins. The problem is that your chance gets lower as the network space and difficulty increase.
4. Plots are never 'consumed'. They are persistent however they are subject to degradation due to HDD health issues. Where the energy efficiency of this currency comes from is that once plotting is done you are only reading the HDD.

 

[kirbyrj]

I have dabbled with this for about a week. I have 33 plots and some 3.5TB of farming space used. In that time, I've seen the network space DOUBLE in size. At this point it seems like it's just a lottery for the small guy. I would think the chances of winning are just about zero for most people.

Honestly, I don't think anyone starting now will even make back the initial investment and more likely just burn out their SSDs in the process.

 

[Aireoth]

I have dabbled with this for about a week. I have 33 plots and some 3.5TB of farming space used. In that time, I've seen the network space DOUBLE in size. At this point it seems like it's just a lottery for the small guy. I would think the chances of winning are just about zero for most people.

Honestly, I don't think anyone starting now will even make back the initial investment.

this, I'm at 35 plots and hitting a ceiling on plot time v. Estimated time to win. I have some spare hardware sitting around and just using regular HDD's to plot, which isn't that much slower than my M2 drive, M2 Drive plotted 14 over the weekend regular HDD did 9.

I'll fill the 8TB of space I have for it and call it a day, either something happens or doesn't. Not putting actual cash into this.