Burst plotting speed

DuronClocker

[H]ard|Gawd
Joined
Mar 12, 2004
Messages
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I'm not sure I understand how I understand the CPU vs. HDD speed thing for plotting. My i5-4690k @ 4.2 is plotting a 3TB WD Purple drive (5400RPM) around 9k nonces/min using all 4 cores on xplotter_avx.

For each new set of nonces, the CPU finishes when the HDD is at about 36-38%, so it seems that most of the time spent plotting is writing to the disk. I assume that this means a higher OC or more cores/threads would be a complete waste to me unless I was maybe plotting 3 drives at once. Been running about 30 hours, and it is 43% complete so far.

Am I correct in that thinking?

I"m putting another machine together, and I was debating what I should do processor-wise, or if it is even worth putting something better than a Celeron in it.
 
I see people mention CPU-plotting drives far faster than this (time-wise I mean), but I don't understand how I guess. Do they just have faster drives? Seems to me they must as I can't see my CPU being the bottle neck here.

Trying to decide how much of a benefit I'd actually have in a second machine with something like an i5/i7 over a Celeron.
 
better drives me thinks, i literally know nothing about mining, but i know those purple drives are slow as piss.
 
It's a combo of the drive speed and CPU threads/cores available. I'm not sure how the clock speed comes into play (it should be relatively minimal gains). But I get the fastest plotting with 8+ threads (Xeon's) assigned to a drive. I also use the fastest interfaces I can get (7200RPM, 6Gbps, USB3 etc).
 
I'm so not meant to do this. After a little over two days, I was 77% through plotting, and my graphics driver decided to crash in the middle of a Skype call *sigh*

Anyways, I'm not positive I'd see a benefit on this current setup with an 8-core (or 8-thread) processor. Seems like the processor is considerably faster than the drive. Maybe that'll be different with a 7200RPM drive?
 
it took 16 hours on a 4TB 7200rpm Toshiba on my 16c32t machine.
I was getting 32K nonces/min
plotting-4TB-drive.jpg
 
I just don't understand if it is solely the nonces/min value that matters. My CPU was doing 9k, but by the time it would finish processing, the disk was only 36-38% through writing, so it seemed in that case that a faster processor would not help at all.
 
Get Gpuplotter

Does many more nonces than cpu, it's not drive speed its generating nonces slowing you down I can plot an external 5400RPM at over 30k nonces easy
 
Yeah, went GpuPlotter route. Tried the direct/optimized option but was having issues. Now going with the buffer/non-optimized version, and it is skipping along at 33k nonce/min. About haflway done with 3TB, looks like its going to take about 6 hours in total. If this goes well, I guess I'll start on the 6TB drive next. Should hopefully end up with 15TB up and running by the end of the week.
 
My 3 8tb seagate Skyhawk drives should be done in another hour or so. I'd be curious to see what the return rate is on optimized vs. un optimized drives are. It's taken 84 hours to plot 24tb. I'd rather plot unop and mine for an extra 2 days..
 
I see people mention CPU-plotting drives far faster than this (time-wise I mean), but I don't understand how I guess. Do they just have faster drives? Seems to me they must as I can't see my CPU being the bottle neck here.

Trying to decide how much of a benefit I'd actually have in a second machine with something like an i5/i7 over a Celeron.
the task is very multithreaded the more cores the better it is also the more ram you have the better it is i would love to bump my pc up to 32gb.

My 3 8tb seagate Skyhawk drives should be done in another hour or so. I'd be curious to see what the return rate is on optimized vs. un optimized drives are. It's taken 84 hours to plot 24tb. I'd rather plot unop and mine for an extra 2 days..
it is read speed and it is a 30% boost... from like 3840ms to 2814ms...

Thus far
on my a10-7850k
read times for a 4tb plot over usb 3.0 on a startech pci-e x4 card with 4 independent controllers
46.7 seconds
on a Athlon x4 845 (it is slightly higher ipc and has AVX2)
42.4 seconds
I am currently plotting my drives using cpu as a burn in for it
I am getting 4000 Nounces per min... ill update later with the new read times
 
So I'm ready to mine and when I log into my burst team us wallet with my passocde...it shows a completely different burst ID. Wtf?????
 
Is it better to have multiple plots per drive or just one huge plot per drive? I have yet to have a deadline less than an hour and I see people getting less than a minute on almost every block. Most of my deadlines are 2 days or less.
 
Is it better to have multiple plots per drive or just one huge plot per drive? I have yet to have a deadline less than an hour and I see people getting less than a minute on almost every block. Most of my deadlines are 2 days or less.
One plot file as far as I've read.
 
Sorry to jump in here but not sure it's worth it's own thread. What is burst mining actually doing, is it mostly reads after the plotting phase? How much would it wear out things like flash storage?
 
Sorry to jump in here but not sure it's worth it's own thread. What is burst mining actually doing, is it mostly reads after the plotting phase? How much would it wear out things like flash storage?
Ya, it just reads the plot, so write the plot once, and it just reads after that.
 
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