News Chia Crypto Plotting Can Destroy an SSD in Weeks

frodoitsmyname

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Mar 4, 2020
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I am thinking of having the whole chia plot done inside of memory and not on hard disk. Does it allow that? Many workstations and servers have 512GB of memory...
yes you can, just watch the video from der8auer. It's just not very useful because you can only do one plot at a time
 

spongiemaster

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Dec 12, 2019
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so a new Intel P5800X with 100DWPD would last how long?
It would last the entire 5 year warranty period. 5800x drives are rated to be able to write the entire capacity of the drive 100 times a day. If you had an 800GB drive, you would be able to plot 3 plots at a time which uses about 1.4TB each, so you wouldn't be remotely close to the daily write limit.
 

mikeebb

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Nov 2, 2014
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Optane (yes, I know, unobtainium - unless you're a huge datacenter...)?

I wonder if Mr. Stoner is on to something. A compute server with a TB of RAM is certainly possible if your pockets are deep enough. Why would doing it all in RAM be limited to one plot at a time?

Even if it is limited to one plot at a time regardless of how much RAM you throw at it, what's wrong with having a cluster of 512GB computer chewing away? It's just power and pollution, right?

And yes, I agree, I don't look forward to the malware that will jump on this. Watch your disk activity light...

EDIT: how does the power use of Chia production compare to Bitcoin, Ethereum, Monero, etc. mining? I could see an article on this, though maybe not in Tom's.
 

spongiemaster

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I wonder if Mr. Stoner is on to something. A compute server with a TB of RAM is certainly possible if your pockets are deep enough. Why would doing it all in RAM be limited to one plot at a time?
It isn't. It depends on how much you have. Deb8uer tested a system with 512GB of RAM. Each plot requires about 240GiB of capacity, so you could probably do 2 plots at a time with enough left over to keep the system up and running. The problem is the extreme upfront cost of that much RAM. Spending $3500 on RAM alone to be able to maybe do 2 plots at a time, you'd never recover the money you were putting in. 1 TB SSD is around $100. For the cost of 512GB of RAM, ignoring the cost of the rest of the system to support that much, you could buy over 30 SSD's.
 

Giroro

Splendid
Here's a bold pitch:
Lets just stop giving our money and resources over to every random basement-dwelling "crypto developer" or backdoor government who wants to sell imaginary internet numbers for a billion dollars. We don't need to help these people build themselves the world's largest personal RAID array.
Have you considered that its a bad idea to buy storage for the sole purpose of renting it out to an anonymous stranger for a tiny fraction of its real value? You don't even know what pirated darkweb botnet garbage "the inventor of BitTorrent" is storing on your computer. Despite what they want you to believe, it's not just random data. The "winning" plots aren't even random - you just happened to be storing some slice of data they wanted to read back.

Ask yourself: "If all they are doing with your machine is "proof of time and space", then why exactly do they need to be constantly writing huge amounts of new data?"
 

g-unit1111

Titan
Moderator
Here's a bold pitch:
Lets just stop giving our money and resources over to every random basement-dwelling "crypto developer" or backdoor government who wants to sell imaginary internet numbers for a billion dollars. We don't need to help these people build themselves the world's largest personal RAID array.
Have you considered that its a bad idea to buy storage for the sole purpose of renting it out to an anonymous stranger for a tiny fraction of its real value? You don't even know what pirated darkweb botnet garbage "the inventor of BitTorrent" is storing on your computer. Despite what they want you to believe, it's not just random data. The "winning" plots aren't even random - you just happened to be storing some slice of data they wanted to read back.

Ask yourself: "If all they are doing with your machine is "proof of time and space", then why exactly do they need to be constantly writing huge amounts of new data?"

Yes I agree with everything said here!

Add to that, coin mining is just a colossal waste of resources, and no matter what hardware the latest mining craze runs on - whether it's GPUs or CPU processes or SSD storage space, any hardware you put into a mining rig is going to have really quick failure rates due to the hardware being used to its' maximum extent. You can only push things so far. Those graphics cards and SSDs will most likely wind up in landfills after they've lived out their usefulness.

And as I keep saying, the people who are actually getting rich off this stuff, are people who you wouldn't trust with 15 cents, let alone millions or billions. In the end the cryptocurrency gold rush is going to wind up like the 1849 gold rush. It will be fool's gold and real winners will be the people selling the mining equipment. In this case, it's Samsung, NVIDIA, AMD, Intel, and Western Digital.
 

GoofyOne

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Apr 4, 2021
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Don't go blowing all your cash on ridiculous amounts of hardware. I think the best way to make money out of CHIA or any other cryptocurrency for that matter is: SELL HIGH, BUY LOW


{GoofyOne's 2c worth ... or perhaps it's 0.000000000000001 CHIA's worth}
 

GoofyOne

Commendable
Apr 4, 2021
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I read the article on here about setting up a machine to do CHIA mining, and I even went to 3 different retailers and made a wish list of what I would need to build such a pc. There were some slight differences but all of them ended up being pretty close to $2,000 Australian dollars.

I chose Z590 motherboards with 3 x M.2 slots. The first M.2 socket would just be for operating system, the other 2 M.2 sockets I was just going to get 2 fast NVMe drives PCIe 3 x 4 1TB, but set them up in a RAID 0 (striped) array. I thought that would save money by using 2 cheaper SSDs, whilst still having a good speed, set up in RAID 0 configuration.

Today I wake up and read all this negativity .... gahh, all my dreams of multi-millions have been dashed .. you are all big meaniez!!! :p



{GoofyOne}
 

InvalidError

Titan
Moderator
8x 64GB RAM and an 8 slot motherboard, just to prevent killing off a $75 consumer grade SSD...how does that make any financial sense.
You need to replace a consumer-grade SSD every couple of weeks. If you plan on mining Chia long-term, you will be spending $1000+/year replacing cheap SSDs. You are far better off using higher-end SSDs with 20+X the write endurance for 3X the cost per TB.

Going all the way to RAM-disk doesn't make much economic sense though since 512GB of RAM only lets you reliably plot one Chia at a time using $1200+ worth of RAM, a ridiculously expensive motherboard and an equally stupidly expensive CPU while 4x 1TB enterprise-grade SSDs would let you get a lot more Chia plotting throughput out of a Ryzen 5800X or i7-11700k on a far more budget-friendly board.
 

Co BIY

Splendid
I am developing a a cat-video based crypto next, so save your money. Purr-fect crypto. It'll power itself on the static electricity of running against your leg. (or heat pump off your fever-dreams of unearned riches - still in development ) .

The developers have only reserved 90% of the total available for themselves (cats no good at share) so it should cut out the slow build up and move straight to the "to the moon madness phase" as people get the fear of missing out right away.

- Seriously - No barriers to entry for new Cryptos means there can be no true shortage or scarcity in crypto. It should not increase in price based on scarcity (Unlike gold, or toilet paper).
 
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The last time I used an online calculator to have an estimation on what Chia would give me, using the best config that I can afford. The results are pretty cold, around $40 of return after a couple of months, not even enough for my electricity bill.

It seems that if you do it with your personal computer, it's only for fun. You won't become millionaire without spending hundreds of thousands USD worth of hardware to run a full-time Chia mining machine room.
 

escksu

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Don't go blowing all your cash on ridiculous amounts of hardware. I think the best way to make money out of CHIA or any other cryptocurrency for that matter is: SELL HIGH, BUY LOW


{GoofyOne's 2c worth ... or perhaps it's 0.000000000000001 CHIA's worth}

HAHA..... sell high buy low.... sounds simple.... So when price is high and everyone is selling, whos going to buy?? When price is low and nobody selling, who can buy?
 

escksu

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The last time I used an online calculator to have an estimation on what Chia would give me, using the best config that I can afford. The results are pretty cold, around $40 of return after a couple of months, not even enough for my electricity bill.

It seems that if you do it with your personal computer, it's only for fun. You won't become millionaire without spending hundreds of thousands USD worth of hardware to run a full-time Chia mining machine room.

Good enough.... look at the dogecoin millionaries... How many kids mine doge for fun back then?? Look at the price of doge today.
 

escksu

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Yes I agree with everything said here!

Add to that, coin mining is just a colossal waste of resources, and no matter what hardware the latest mining craze runs on - whether it's GPUs or CPU processes or SSD storage space, any hardware you put into a mining rig is going to have really quick failure rates due to the hardware being used to its' maximum extent. You can only push things so far. Those graphics cards and SSDs will most likely wind up in landfills after they've lived out their usefulness.

And as I keep saying, the people who are actually getting rich off this stuff, are people who you wouldn't trust with 15 cents, let alone millions or billions. In the end the cryptocurrency gold rush is going to wind up like the 1849 gold rush. It will be fool's gold and real winners will be the people selling the mining equipment. In this case, it's Samsung, NVIDIA, AMD, Intel, and Western Digital.

lol..... sour grape because you miss the boat and couldn't make any money from it....
 

FPS-fan

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Oct 30, 2016
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I don't usually post here, but when I read the first story on "How to Farm Chia Coin, the New Storage-Based Cryptocurrency," I wanted to say something. What I read with interest was about using an SSD for initial 'temp' storage, or "The Temporary Directory will be your big and fast SSD drive," (original story) and then send the plots to platter storage. The heckles on the back my neck stood up at that suggestion. I've always read that SSDs don't like being used for temp files. So much so I disable everything temp-file or caching related on my own SSDs, even to the point that I use a separate platter drive specifically for all temp files--at the cost of caching speed over drive life. I can understand that higher priced SSDs might handle caching better than cheaper ones, but even if I'd bought a premium drive, I still think I'd disable temp and caching in exchange for a good night's sleep. It will be interesting to see what improvements hard drives designers and manufacturers think of using to address the issue of disk deterioration due to continual writing/caching and its effects on drive longevity, in the face of this new area of digital mining and related hardware requirements.
 

InvalidError

Titan
Moderator
It will be interesting to see what improvements hard drives designers and manufacturers think of using to address the issue of disk deterioration due to continual writing/caching and its effects on drive longevity, in the face of this new area of digital mining and related hardware requirements.
There won't be any changes where HDDs are concerned since enterprise-grade HDDs have been in use in IO-intensive workloads for decades already. Anything that could possibly be thought of to improve drive reliability, speed, density, etc. has either already been done or is already being worked on regardless of Chia.
 
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