News Chia: Stop Farming with Consumer SSDs or Stop Complaining About Endurance

[Admin]

Chia released a statement in response to complaints that farming its cryptocurrency might wreck some SSDs.

Chia: Stop Farming with Consumer SSDs or Stop Complaining About Endurance : Read more

 

[lvt]

Well it's like driving your daily commute car on a F1 piste at high speed, one moment or another the engine will quite on you.

 

[hotaru.hino]

Of course people who see nothing but gold in their eyes won't understand the limitations of tech and demand we substitute reality for their own. 🙃

 

[Rdslw]

so 25$ drive works for 40 days earning propably 100$ and then dies. I have no idea what are the power costs, I bet some of those still can double their value, so they will continue to be used like that.

 

[velocityg4]

The cheap consumer SSD are wasteful for this anyways. Their performance is horrible when doing a lot of writes. Once their cache fills up, they tank. You're better off buying a bunch of small used hard drives on the cheap. Creating one plot per drive.

I've been toying with it since I have a lot of extra storage. While it's too late to make much money. I may as well let the drives partially pay for themselves and destroy plots when I need more space for my file server.

Anyways, I've found a single old 7200RPM drive beat the plot time of a cheap SSD. It takes about 12 hours on the same system (i5 3570K, 16GB RAM) with the same plot settings vs 14 to 16 with a cheap SSD. I've even set them to plot at the same time, thinking I was wrong, and the 7200 RPM drives would pull out ahead. Hitting 100% complete when the SSD was around 70%.

Using two 7200RPM drives in RAID 0 takes 8 to 10 hours (i5-2400). That's getting closer to the times of my Samsung 980 (i5-11400) and dual Samsung 870 Evo in RAID 0 (i5-11400). Just as good as my Crucial X8 using USB 3.1 Gen 2 (i5-11400). That's with everything set to the default two threads 3.5GB RAM. Obviously the good SSD pull out with more threads. But it reduces the number of simultaneous plots my CPU can handle. The cheap SSD it didn't matter how many threads or how much RAM I gave it.

To be fair each of those high performance SSD are working two to three plots at a time, staggered. That just means with a bunch of cheap old HDD set in RAID 0 pairs. Working one plot each. You can get close to a decent sustained write SSD. All for a lot less money without worrying about wear. You just need the ports.

For anyone curious about heavy write performance. Two 512GB Samsung 870 Evo in RAID 0 beats a single 1TB Samsung 980 in plotting. A Crucial X8 1TB is really disappointing.

 

[spentshells]

I like this scam

 

[Kamen Rider Blade]

Chia, like all CryptoCurrency, can go take along walk off a short cliff.

What a waste of Electricity/Hardware/Resources.

 

[gg83]

What if there is a conspiracy of crypto mining/farming where its all a cover to steal processing power for something.

 

[zodiacfml]

what is with all the Chia articles? does this have a mining pool otherwise too risky

 

[GoofyOne]

Yes the problem with most SSD's is that they throttle and become much slower after their cache fills up. Fast HDD's in RAID 0 sounds like a good option, or you could even get some cheap second hand 12Gbps SAS server HDD, and put those in a RAID 0 array.

Alot of the PCIe RAID controllers will work with SAS or SATA drives. The SAS drives are often 10k or 15k rpm, though I am not sure how that affects their read and write performance. It's all 6 of one and half a dozen of the other which way you go.

I was reading the other day about guys who are using secondhand servers, with 64GB memory and decent Intel Xeon cpu's to do up to 42 plots per day.

In the end, it all depends how much money you want to throw at it and risk on it.


{GoofyOne's 2c worth ... which may or may not be actually worth 2c}

 

[spentshells]

What if there is a conspiracy of crypto mining/farming where its all a cover to steal processing power for something.

I sure hope so, but just so it would be fun!

 

[lvt]

I'm waiting for a crypto mining method that uses the cooling fans in the computer, the more airflow coming out of your computer, the more mining power you got.

 

[venser]

Why is there farming? Who decides this crap has any value?

 

[PhilFrisbie]

Creating Chia plots using striped conventional drives greatly decreases the plotting time. I have an old i5 quad core PC with two striped 1 TB drives and it can produce a plot every 9 hours, and it will continue for years if needed I would expect a striped array with 3 or 4 drives to perform even better.

 

[Giroro]

Chia still needs to answer exactly what data they're storing in these plots, what percentage of the storage in their network is being utilized, why they want an exabyte-scale storage array, and why storing tiny slivers of files requires drives to be constantly rewriting hundreds of terrabytes worth of data. Is all this storage being used for personal projects, or are they going to start renting it out to Enterprise/Countries/Dark Web?

Of course, the short answer is they probably don't care about how much wear is burned into all of their unlimited free storage. Odds are the devs are going to bail once they've built enough confidence in their scheme that their "strategic reserve" of free coins makes them all billionaires. They aren't going to explain the plan, because exposing that level of cynical supervillainry will surely inhibit their ability to take people's money.

 

[gg83]

Chia still needs to answer exactly what data they're storing in these plots, what percentage of the storage in their network is being utilized, why they want an exabyte-scale storage array, and why storing tiny slivers of files requires drives to be constantly rewriting hundreds of terrabytes worth of data. Is all this storage being used for personal projects, or are they going to start renting it out to Enterprise/Countries/Dark Web?

Of course, the short answer is they probably don't care about how much wear is burned into all of their unlimited free storage. Odds are the devs are going to bail once they've built enough confidence in their scheme that their "strategic reserve" of free coins makes them all billionaires. They aren't going to explain the plan, because exposing that level of cynical supervillainry will surely inhibit their ability to take people's money.

I was thinking about the same thing, you worded it perfectly.

 

[spongiemaster]

Creating Chia plots using striped conventional drives greatly decreases the plotting time. I have an old i5 quad core PC with two striped 1 TB drives and it can produce a plot every 9 hours, and it will continue for years if needed I would expect a striped array with 3 or 4 drives to perform even better.

That's fine if you're plotting one plot at a time and the drives can write one stream without seeking which will maximize throughput. One plot at a time will also never make you any money. Try plotting 6 or more plots in parallel and see how the hard drives in RAID hold up vs an SSD.

 

[Umfriend]

And again Tom's gets the headline wrong. No, farming Chia won't affect your SSD. Plotting will. Geesh, and then they recommend systems for plotting, they should know better.

 

[nimbulan]

Honestly farming Chia at home seems pretty pointless anyway. A single plot is already up to an average of 70 YEARS to be selected (since it's a lottery system, essentially, and the plots are tickets.) You really need a giant server rack to have any reasonable chance of earning Chia.

 

[Tdkseedr]

Do u even know what farming is? No one farms with ssds