News How to Farm Chia Coin, the New Storage-Based Cryptocurrency

[spongiemaster]

I'm a little confused, if with the recommended system you can farm 18 plots, why it would take 30 days to fill up 10TB HDD (91 plot)?!
"At a rate of 18 plots per day, it would take about 30 days of solid plotting time to fill six 10TB HDDs. "

It takes 30 days to fill up six 10 TB drives. That's 551 plots.

 

[cantak]

This article sure has caused me a lot of pain and suffering. Your original specs included a u.2 drive. That doesn't work with the motherboard you recommended. Well I bought two of everything. Having issues returning too

 

[JarredWaltonGPU]

This article sure has caused me a lot of pain and suffering. Your original specs included a u.2 drive. That doesn't work with the motherboard you recommended. Well I bought two of everything. Having issues returning too

It will work — just needs a U.2 adapter. A PCIe add-in boars can be had for about $50, maybe less. Sorry I omitted that bit. I changed the SSD to something cheaper that should still work just as well, and in part because I decided the U.2 adapter was an extra hassle.

 

[sammyzz]

I am using specs similar to the 10x system, but it is taking almost 20 hours to get 10 plots done simultaneously. Do I need to overclock the ram or something? No idea how you are getting 30 plots a day with that setup, any help is appreciated!

 

[JarredWaltonGPU]

I am using specs similar to the 10x system, but it is taking almost 20 hours to get 10 plots done simultaneously. Do I need to overclock the ram or something? No idea how you are getting 30 plots a day with that setup, any help is appreciated!

SSD speed, CPU speed (and cores), and RAM speed all matter. What exact SSD, CPU, and RAM do you have? If you don’t have more than 40GB of RAM and a 10-core or greater VPU, ten plots will choke the PC.

 

[StanlyBG]

I am using specs similar to the 10x system to, but have problem -long time like sammyzz.
MB Asrock Z590 Phantom Gaming 4 (PSU 650 Gold)
I9-10900 Box (10 Gen - ram <3000!, only overclock >3000 )
KINSTOM M2 120Gb for Win 10
Fury HyperX DDR4 RAM 3200 -2X 32GB
Corsair MP400 4TB NVMe PCIe M.2 SSD
2 X Seagate BarraCuda 4TB, 5400 об/мин, 256MB, SATA3
I expect 2 External HD USB 3 16Tb

Please explain for such configuration:
memory settings, number of cores
Optimal Delay for Fast Parallel Plotting

 

[JarredWaltonGPU]

I am using specs similar to the 10x system to, but have problem -long time like sammyzz.
MB Asrock Z590 Phantom Gaming 4 (PSU 650 Gold)
I9-10900 Box (10 Gen - ram <3000!, only overclock >3000 )
KINSTOM M2 120Gb for Win 10
Fury HyperX DDR4 RAM 3200 -2X 32GB
Corsair MP400 4TB NVMe PCIe M.2 SSD
2 X Seagate BarraCuda 4TB, 5400 об/мин, 256MB, SATA3
I expect 2 External HD USB 3 16Tb

Please explain for such configuration:
memory settings, number of cores
Optimal Delay for Fast Parallel Plotting

So, what I would suggest is starting 10 separate queues, not concurrent, with 2 threads per queue (the default). Your temp plotting directory will be on the 4TB SSD, and the final destination folder will be to one of the HDDs. I'm assuming for the purposes of this post that you have the following drive letters:

C: = OS (not used for Chia, other than for holding the main app and blockchain -- you really should get a 256GB or larger SSD IMO)
D: = Plotting SSD (make sure this is actually in the primary M.2 slot that has the direct link to the CPU for performance reasons)
E: = SATA 4TB HDD1
F: = SATA 4TB HDD2
G: = USB 16TB HDD3
H: = USB 16TB HDD4

1. Start the first queue, give it a name (like "D1toE1" or whatever your drive letters are), and put maybe 10 plots into this queue. Start it.
2. Wait about 1-2 minutes, then repeat the above with a new name ("D2toF1"), start it.
3. If you have the two external drives, do two more queus spaced about a minute apart ("D3toG1" and "D4toH1"), each with 10 plots.
4. You now have four queues that are each 10 plots deep running at the same time, using about 8 of the CPU threads.
5. Now, because you only have 4 HDDs, I'd wait 10-15 minutes and then repeat the above, once again for each HDD.
6. That brings you up to eight concurrent queues that are ten deep (16 threads in use, about 800-1000GB/s of writes to the SSD).
7. Wait 15-20 more minutes and start the final two queus ("D9toG3" and "D10toH3" or whatever -- not that the queue names really matter, but it will help you figure out what's going where in the GUI).

You could start these other queues whenever, but the main issue is when the plots are done, the PC needs to copy them all to the HDD. 101.4GiB of data at a rate of maybe 100-150 MB/s will take 12–18 minutes, and if you have multiple queues ending at the same time for the same drive, you'll increase the bottleneck on the HDD. There are ways to do all of this from the command line as well, but that's more complex so I'm not going to try to figure that out.

How long will it take to complete all those plots? I'm not entirely sure, as it will depend on the final SSD speed, CPU speed, RAM speed, and HDD speed during the process. Most likely it will take less than 8 hours per cycle through the queues, meaning you'd do more than 30 plots per day, but it's possible the SSD when tasked with ten separate plots will slow down a bit (should be around 1GB/s of writes, which it can handle ... but can it sustain that over the long haul? I don't know). If you get it all up and running per these instructions, I'd love to hear your feedback on final plotting times the system sustains. We also have some people (our RAM and SSD reviewers) working to determine how much speed you need on each of those and how it scales. But that will take some testing so we'll have future articles on those subjects.

 

[Drkiz]

How to setup up a Chia coin farm, including hardware recommendations, how to create plots, and potential rewards.

How to Farm Chia Coin, the New Storage-Based Cryptocurrency : Read more

Hi! I joined because of this article. Read the thread and can't seem to find the answer to my question.

Oh, and hi to everyone. I see some of you do not like crypto so I am sorry to join and start right away asking questions about that subject in a sort of way!

Anyhow, in the 6 x 10tb drive build (which I ordered the parts list for today.) is there anything not listed?

I can build a computer and have built half a dozen mining rigs, but I am curious as to the hard drive layout on the 6x plotter.

What I am most curious about is if that build is a 3 hard drive build: OS/Plotter/Plot storage or is it a 2 hard drive build: OS and Plotter/Plot storage?

I ordered the Sabrent Rocket 4 Plus 2tb SSD and some of the 10tb Seagate Exos HDD's.

Thanks for having me to the forum.

BTW. Bitcoin is exponentially more trackable than cash. You can literally peer inside someone's/anyone's wallet and see every single transaction they have ever done. Can't blacklist a $100 bill, but you can blacklist a bitcoin.

 

[GoofyOne]

I had a thought (I know I know, pick yourselves up off the floor, stop laughing).

I was thinking that if you had a motherboard with 2 or 3 M.2 sockets, you could just use 2 lower cost M.2 NVMe PCIe3 x 4 SSDs, but in RAID 0 mode so it effectively increases the read/write speed. I have never tried it though. Just thinking of all those poor overworked SSDs that will need to be replaced after a while.


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

 

[JarredWaltonGPU]

Hi! I joined because of this article. Read the thread and can't seem to find the answer to my question.

Oh, and hi to everyone. I see some of you do not like crypto so I am sorry to join and start right away asking questions about that subject in a sort of way!

Anyhow, in the 6 x 10tb drive build (which I ordered the parts list for today.) is there anything not listed?

I can build a computer and have built half a dozen mining rigs, but I am curious as to the hard drive layout on the 6x plotter.

What I am most curious about is if that build is a 3 hard drive build: OS/Plotter/Plot storage or is it a 2 hard drive build: OS and Plotter/Plot storage?

I ordered the Sabrent Rocket 4 Plus 2tb SSD and some of the 10tb Seagate Exos HDD's.

Thanks for having me to the forum.

BTW. Bitcoin is exponentially more trackable than cash. You can literally peer inside someone's/anyone's wallet and see every single transaction they have ever done. Can't blacklist a $100 bill, but you can blacklist a bitcoin.

You probably want an OS drive (small-ish SSD), a plotting SSD (large and fast), and then you could do up to six or ten hard drives at a time -- or half that number, or whatever.

Basically, it takes somewhere around 6-8 hours (depending on various factors) for a fast CPU, RAM, and SSD to complete a plot. It takes a bit more time if you're doing multiple plots at the same time, but you can and definitely should do at least half the number of CPU cores -- and potentially half the number of threads. I've recommended the second, so a 6-core/12-thread CPU should do six plots, and a 12-core/24-thread CPU could do up to 12 plots.

If you start all of the plots at the same time, they'll all finish relatively close together. The big problem then is that Chia needs to move all the finished plots from the fast SSD to the HDD. Most HDDs will write at about 100-200 MB/s (faster when they're empty, slower when they're nearly full). Thus, it takes about 10-20 minutes to transfer just a single plot to the HDD.

If you're doing six plots with a single HDD, and they all finish at the same time, you'll end up with a 1-2 hour wait when all plots are finished while they write to the HDD. If you have six HDDs (USB3.0 for example), you can cut that back to 10-20 minutes.

So if you're planning to scale up to six HDDs eventually, or ten HDDs, you might as well put them all in from the start. At the very least, do half the total of HDDs (three or five), with two staggered queues going to each one. If you start the queues 15 minutes apart, then the HDD writes at the end shouldn't overlap much if at all.

 

[JarredWaltonGPU]

I had a thought (I know I know, pick yourselves up off the floor, stop laughing).

I was thinking that if you had a motherboard with 2 or 3 M.2 sockets, you could just use 2 lower cost M.2 NVMe PCIe3 x 4 SSDs, but in RAID 0 mode so it effectively increases the read/write speed. I have never tried it though. Just thinking of all those poor overworked SSDs that will need to be replaced after a while.

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

RAID0 is possible, but endurance is still a factor. Larger capacity SSDs will generally last longer. Speed of SSD only matters up to a certain point as well. Still, doing two 2TB SSDs instead of a single 4TB SSD is probably a good idea. You don't even need to do them in RAID0, though -- just do half the plots on one SSD and half on the other.

In fact, I'd recommend staying away from RAID0 as if either drive fails, the whole array goes down. Better to have one fail independently of the other. I'd say the same for HDDs. You could speed up the write to HDD portion by having RAID0 arrays, but now if one drive in the array fails, you lose all the plots.

 

[Deleted member 2851593]

Glad to see that Tom's Hardware readers have to flex both of their brain cells in every cryptocurrency related article.

 

[Drkiz]

You probably want an OS drive (small-ish SSD), a plotting SSD (large and fast), and then you could do up to six or ten hard drives at a time -- or half that number, or whatever.

Basically, it takes somewhere around 6-8 hours (depending on various factors) for a fast CPU, RAM, and SSD to complete a plot. It takes a bit more time if you're doing multiple plots at the same time, but you can and definitely should do at least half the number of CPU cores -- and potentially half the number of threads. I've recommended the second, so a 6-core/12-thread CPU should do six plots, and a 12-core/24-thread CPU could do up to 12 plots.

If you start all of the plots at the same time, they'll all finish relatively close together. The big problem then is that Chia needs to move all the finished plots from the fast SSD to the HDD. Most HDDs will write at about 100-200 MB/s (faster when they're empty, slower when they're nearly full). Thus, it takes about 10-20 minutes to transfer just a single plot to the HDD.

If you're doing six plots with a single HDD, and they all finish at the same time, you'll end up with a 1-2 hour wait when all plots are finished while they write to the HDD. If you have six HDDs (USB3.0 for example), you can cut that back to 10-20 minutes.

So if you're planning to scale up to six HDDs eventually, or ten HDDs, you might as well put them all in from the start. At the very least, do half the total of HDDs (three or five), with two staggered queues going to each one. If you start the queues 15 minutes apart, then the HDD writes at the end shouldn't overlap much if at all.

Thank you for your well written response.

I have the exact setup from the article as below:

Component	Description	Price
CPU	Core i5-11400	$189
Motherboard	MSI Z490-A Pro	$180
Cooler	Box cooler	$0
Memory	Team T-Create 32GB DDR4-3200	$145
SSD Storage	Sabrent Rocket 4 Plus 2TB	$451
HDD Storage	6 x Seagate Exos X10 10TB	$232
Alternative USB HDD	2x Seagate Portable 5TB	$200
GPU	Integrated UHD 750	$0
PSU	Thermaltake Toughpower GX2 80 Plus Gold 600W	$75
Case	Phanteks Eclipse P360X	$80

I was planning on plotting from the 2TB M2 SSD drive to the 6 10TB HDD Seagate drives as you laid out. With the complete build set up from the get go. I have a couple extra portable 5TB drives as well.

From what I can see the MSI Z490-A Pro as recommended only has 6 SATA ports, so am I correct to assume that is going to tie up the 6 10TB Seagate HDD, leaving no room for a 240 GB drive for the OS and I'll have to run the OS from the M2 SSD drive that I'm using for plotting? Or can I add another M2 SSD for the OS to the motherboard? Or a pci-e to sata maybe?

Sorry I'm a little new to this. Autistic, and maybe overthinking everything but kinda confused as to how to lay out and put in the hard drives properly/most efficiently.

I was planning on filling the 6 10 TB drives and some of the portable 5TB drives as they are cheap and easy to aquire. Run 16 of them from a Sabrent USB hub into the same build.

I was hoping I could fill another 6 x 10TB drives from the same plotter, but not sure what the cheapest harvester would be to set up for a bunch of 10TB drives. Raspberry Pi?

 

[JarredWaltonGPU]

Thank you for your well written response.

I have the exact setup from the article as below:

Component	Description	Price
CPU	Core i5-11400	$189
Motherboard	MSI Z490-A Pro	$180
Cooler	Box cooler	$0
Memory	Team T-Create 32GB DDR4-3200	$145
SSD Storage	Sabrent Rocket 4 Plus 2TB	$451
HDD Storage	6 x Seagate Exos X10 10TB	$232
Alternative USB HDD	2x Seagate Portable 5TB	$200
GPU	Integrated UHD 750	$0
PSU	Thermaltake Toughpower GX2 80 Plus Gold 600W	$75
Case	Phanteks Eclipse P360X	$80

I was planning on plotting from the 2TB M2 SSD drive to the 6 10TB HDD Seagate drives as you laid out. With the complete build set up from the get go. I have a couple extra portable 5TB drives as well.

From what I can see the MSI Z490-A Pro as recommended only has 6 SATA ports, so am I correct to assume that is going to tie up the 6 10TB Seagate HDD, leaving no room for a 240 GB drive for the OS and I'll have to run the OS from the M2 SSD drive that I'm using for plotting? Or can I add another M2 SSD for the OS to the motherboard? Or a pci-e to sata maybe?

Sorry I'm a little new to this. Autistic, and maybe overthinking everything but kinda confused as to how to lay out and put in the hard drives properly/most efficiently.

I was planning on filling the 6 10 TB drives and some of the portable 5TB drives as they are cheap and easy to aquire. Run 16 of them from a Sabrent USB hub into the same build.

I was hoping I could fill another 6 x 10TB drives from the same plotter, but not sure what the cheapest harvester would be to set up for a bunch of 10TB drives. Raspberry Pi?

There are actually two M.2 slots on that motherboard, so I'd put a small drive in the bottom one and the large 2TB in the top slot (with the heatshield). I didn't include the extra smaller M.2 drive as technically you could do everything from a single large drive -- but if the drive wears out from lots of plotting, you'd need to reinstall the OS and that would suck, so don't do that! Hahaha. And make sure you have a backup of your Chia key.

Once you've filled all the SATA drives, you would need either some sort of external NAS with SATA connections, or USB to SATA adapters and powered USB hubs, or a second PC that you could connect them to. Alternatively, there are PCIe SATA cards that you could add. But long-term, using a bunch of USB drives with powered hubs becomes far easier, and you could connect those to a Raspberry Pi if desired.

I do wonder if RPi might be too slow to get hits on farmed blocks. I'll be honest and say I have yet to hit a single block. My odds are pretty decent over the course of a month, but nothing is guaranteed. Still, I know someone with like 150 TiB dedicated to a farm and they haven't hit a single block either, which makes me wonder if the distribution of nodes or TimeLords or something is a factor. I really hope pooled farming lands soon!

 

[StanlyBG]

... How long will it take to complete all those plots?...
Thanks for the advice. I bought another HDD and released 10 X 10 plots according to your instructions. I left 30 minutes after the first five. Unfortunately it took 28 hours to complete the first 20 plots.
In a test with the "CrystalDiskMark 7" Corsair MP400 M.2 NVMe SSD performs excellently (Read 3500 Mb/s, Write 3000 Mb/s). But when 10 plotting, task menager Corsair disk transfer rate (200 - 500Mb/s)?!
Latest version of the BIOS, the latest drivers for the motherboard. I am desperate, and when I saw 800TBW for 600 euros paid. And it is said that 3D QLC NAND is not good for chia farming.
Could the problem be from the slow (C: Win10 )SSD KINGSTON SA400M8120G 120.0 GB(SATA/600) on my Ultra M.2 Socket (M2_2), supports SATA3 6.0 Gb/s module and M.2 PCI Express module up to Gen3 x4 (32 Gb/s) ?
Corsair MP400 M.2 NVMe SSD is in the slot Ultra M.2 Socket (M2_3), supports SATA3 6.0 Gb/s module and M.2 PCI Express module up to Gen3 x4 (32 Gb/s).
I ordered XPG S40G 4TB RGB (delivery probably the end of June)и 10 ports hub 3.0. Hopefully it is not a problem in the motherboard because there are no good reviews for it.
In an experiment with 1 plots I got a unique result:
Plot size is: 32
Buffer size is: 12000MiB
Using 128 buckets
Using 8 threads of stripe size 65536
Time for phase 1 = 5606.478 seconds. CPU (254.580%)
Time for phase 2 = 2941.089 seconds. CPU (97.290%)
Time for phase 3 = 6656.130 seconds. CPU (89.620%)
Time for phase 4 = 495.868 seconds. CPU (88.610%)
Total time = 15699.568 seconds. CPU (149.940%)
Less than 4 and a half hours !
I'm waiting for suggestions on how to reduce the time (10 X 10 plots) at least to 8h.

 

[Drkiz]

There are actually two M.2 slots on that motherboard, so I'd put a small drive in the bottom one and the large 2TB in the top slot (with the heatshield). I didn't include the extra smaller M.2 drive as technically you could do everything from a single large drive -- but if the drive wears out from lots of plotting, you'd need to reinstall the OS and that would suck, so don't do that! Hahaha. And make sure you have a backup of your Chia key.

Once you've filled all the SATA drives, you would need either some sort of external NAS with SATA connections, or USB to SATA adapters and powered USB hubs, or a second PC that you could connect them to. Alternatively, there are PCIe SATA cards that you could add. But long-term, using a bunch of USB drives with powered hubs becomes far easier, and you could connect those to a Raspberry Pi if desired.

I do wonder if RPi might be too slow to get hits on farmed blocks. I'll be honest and say I have yet to hit a single block. My odds are pretty decent over the course of a month, but nothing is guaranteed. Still, I know someone with like 150 TiB dedicated to a farm and they haven't hit a single block either, which makes me wonder if the distribution of nodes or TimeLords or something is a factor. I really hope pooled farming lands soon!

Thank you for the further explanation. I have a 250 GB Samsung M2 SSD drive , and a 16 port USB 3.0 hub on the way!

For the Sabrent 2tb SSD, does that require an additional heatshield? I see that they can be added but does not come with one.

Thank you for the well written article. I really like building systems, mining rigs were fun and I learned alot. This is a slightly different build and system and looks like it will be fun to build too.

Mining got me hooked, so next in line is building some high end gaming /VR computers. Looks like I'll have a bunch of spare GPU's soon anyways.

I think I'll do 60tb of Solo, or at least until the pools come out. I see guys hitting a block with 1tb, and others with over 100tb yet to see one.

I'll have fun building the system, and hopefully luck pays a visit at some point for us all.

Good luck on your farming!

 

[StanlyBG]

Drkiz - "For the Sabrent 2tb SSD, does that require an additional heatshield? "
Test Sabrent 2tb SSD with the program CrystalDiskInfo.
My Corsair MP400 M.2 NVMe SSD 4Tb + additional heatshield 145℉

 

[Drkiz]

Drkiz - "For the Sabrent 2tb SSD, does that require an additional heatshield? "
Test Sabrent 2tb SSD with the program CrystalDiskInfo.
My Corsair MP400 M.2 NVMe SSD 4Tb + additional heatshield 145℉

So probably going to need one.

 

[Drkiz]

So I received the Phantek 360x eclipse. It has slots for two 3.5” HDD. Does anyone know where the other 4 are supposed to go????

Did the author build this or just write up a parts list?

 

[JarredWaltonGPU]

So I received the Phantek 360x eclipse. It has slots for two 3.5” HDD. Does anyone know where the other 4 are supposed to go????

Did the author build this or just write up a parts list?

I did not build this exact system -- ordering in the parts would have taken far more time and money. I have used several few Phanteks cases, they're good options, but perhaps the P360X wasn't the ideal choice for a PC if you want to scale out to lots of SATA drives. However, as I note in the text, using USB 5TB drives actually makes for potentially easier expansion (if you buy a powered USB bracket beyond a certain number of drives) and has a lower cost per TB.

The P360X case supports up to two 3.5-inch drives and three 2.5-inch drives (SSDs). If you want to add more HDDs, you would need to go a different route -- you could set them next to the case (messy), get an external enclosure (one with lots of expansion options, preferrably), or migrate the drives to a PC with more connectivity.

 

[Drkiz]

I did not build this exact system -- ordering in the parts would have taken far more time and money. I have used several few Phanteks cases, they're good options, but perhaps the P360X wasn't the ideal choice for a PC if you want to scale out to lots of SATA drives. However, as I note in the text, using USB 5TB drives actually makes for potentially easier expansion (if you buy a powered USB bracket beyond a certain number of drives) and has a lower cost per TB.

The P360X case supports up to two 3.5-inch drives and three 2.5-inch drives (SSDs). If you want to add more HDDs, you would need to go a different route -- you could set them next to the case (messy), get an external enclosure (one with lots of expansion options, preferrably), or migrate the drives to a PC with more connectivity.

Thank you. You might want to update your article and also let people know the psu doesn’t need the extra four pins to run the mobo.

Nice build. About to plot.

 

[Slagathar]

So, what I would suggest is starting 10 separate queues, not concurrent, with 2 threads per queue (the default). Your temp plotting directory will be on the 4TB SSD, and the final destination folder will be to one of the HDDs. I'm assuming for the purposes of this post that you have the following drive letters:

C: = OS (not used for Chia, other than for holding the main app and blockchain -- you really should get a 256GB or larger SSD IMO)
D: = Plotting SSD (make sure this is actually in the primary M.2 slot that has the direct link to the CPU for performance reasons)
E: = SATA 4TB HDD1
F: = SATA 4TB HDD2
G: = USB 16TB HDD3
H: = USB 16TB HDD4

1. Start the first queue, give it a name (like "D1toE1" or whatever your drive letters are), and put maybe 10 plots into this queue. Start it.
2. Wait about 1-2 minutes, then repeat the above with a new name ("D2toF1"), start it.
3. If you have the two external drives, do two more queus spaced about a minute apart ("D3toG1" and "D4toH1"), each with 10 plots.
4. You now have four queues that are each 10 plots deep running at the same time, using about 8 of the CPU threads.
5. Now, because you only have 4 HDDs, I'd wait 10-15 minutes and then repeat the above, once again for each HDD.
6. That brings you up to eight concurrent queues that are ten deep (16 threads in use, about 800-1000GB/s of writes to the SSD).
7. Wait 15-20 more minutes and start the final two queus ("D9toG3" and "D10toH3" or whatever -- not that the queue names really matter, but it will help you figure out what's going where in the GUI).

You could start these other queues whenever, but the main issue is when the plots are done, the PC needs to copy them all to the HDD. 101.4GiB of data at a rate of maybe 100-150 MB/s will take 12–18 minutes, and if you have multiple queues ending at the same time for the same drive, you'll increase the bottleneck on the HDD. There are ways to do all of this from the command line as well, but that's more complex so I'm not going to try to figure that out.

How long will it take to complete all those plots? I'm not entirely sure, as it will depend on the final SSD speed, CPU speed, RAM speed, and HDD speed during the process. Most likely it will take less than 8 hours per cycle through the queues, meaning you'd do more than 30 plots per day, but it's possible the SSD when tasked with ten separate plots will slow down a bit (should be around 1GB/s of writes, which it can handle ... but can it sustain that over the long haul? I don't know). If you get it all up and running per these instructions, I'd love to hear your feedback on final plotting times the system sustains. We also have some people (our RAM and SSD reviewers) working to determine how much speed you need on each of those and how it scales. But that will take some testing so we'll have future articles on those subjects.

I basically built the 10x machine (same CPU, same 4TB Adata x2 SSDs, better RAM) and the most I've squeezed out in one day is 23 plots. I've been tweaking settings over the last week and can't seem to get any further.

I'm using Swar Chia Plot Manager from Github and it's working great. Based on reading, it appears only phase 1 of plotting takes advantage of multiple CPU threads. So I allocate more threads per plot, but limit the number of plots that can be in phase 1 (which Swar manages for me). This helps drive down Phase 1 plot times without over- allocating CPU threads. At the moment I have two separate jobs, and each job has it's own SSD and 3 10TB final storage drives. Each job can have up to 4 concurrent plots, but only a single plot in phase 1. Once a plot moves to phase 2, a new plot will start. When a plot finishes, a new one starts, assuming there is not already a plot in phase 1, otherwise it waits for it to be done.

Once I try to bump up concurrent plots, the time/plot just starts to take too long for the additional parallel plotting to make sense. I'd really love to get to 30 plots/day out of this build, but I'm not sure it's possible. I'm continuing to tweak and see what I find.

A note about the 4TB SSD: It gets waaaaaay too hot. I ended up removing the plastic cover thing on ADATA drive (the RGB is not in that, it's on the card itself) and putting a $10 heatsink on it. That plastic cover peels off pretty easily. Much, much better now. If your motherboard does not have one of those integrated M.2 cooling covers, I'd highly recommend buying one of the $10 heatsinks I did.

 

[Mikezuzia]

Thank you for the recommended setup = I would have had zero starting place without that. That being said, there are a couple of very impt updates:
The i5 11th Gen processor is needed, BUT, with the recommended MSi motherboard, a 10th gen processor is also needed to update the BIOS because there is no flashback button/port and the system will not POST out of the box without a 10th Gen CPU. You should factor in cost for a pro or cost for a 10th gen processor for individual install. Or, ideally, get a diferent motherboard with a flashback button.

Next nuance is if you opt to get a separate m.2 drive for the windows boot disk (as recommended at the end of the article) , Guess what? - with the recommended motherboard you drop from 6 SATA drives to 4 SATA so the numbers on the build are not accurate. From MSI Z490 A pro manual -- : SATA5 & SATA6 will be unavailable when installing M.2 SATA/PCIe SSD in the M2_2 slot. SATA 5 and 6 will not work if you have a boot drive, so you will have to make up for 20 TB of missing capacity based on this article. To summarize, there is no way you will get 60 TB of data with this setup.

Summary - a different Mother board should've been recommended - current recommendation will force people to spend more than projected. You will have to spend more money on a different motherboard, or additional CPU (to update factory BIOS) .

Oh, I completely forgot about case recommendation - the recommedned case has no achorage for the 6 HDDs. You will have to get a hotbox swap multi drive box or a different case - neither cost is factored into the recommended setup.

 

[Drkiz]

Thank you for the recommended setup = I would have had zero starting place without that. That being said, there are a couple of very impt updates:
The i5 11th Gen processor is needed, BUT, with the recommended MSi motherboard, a 10th gen processor is also needed to update the BIOS because there is no flashback button/port and the system will not POST out of the box without a 10th Gen CPU. You should factor in cost for a pro or cost for a 10th gen processor for individual install. Or, ideally, get a diferent motherboard with a flashback button.

Next nuance is if you opt to get a separate m.2 drive for the windows boot disk (as recommended at the end of the article) , Guess what? - with the recommended motherboard you drop from 6 SATA drives to 4 SATA so the numbers on the build are not accurate. From MSI Z490 A pro manual -- : SATA5 & SATA6 will be unavailable when installing M.2 SATA/PCIe SSD in the M2_2 slot. SATA 5 and 6 will not work if you have a boot drive, so you will have to make up for 20 TB of missing capacity based on this article. To summarize, there is no way you will get 60 TB of data with this setup.

Summary - a different Mother board should've been recommended - current recommendation will force people to spend more than projected. You will have to spend more money on a different motherboard, or additional CPU (to update factory BIOS) .

Oh, I completely forgot about case recommendation - the recommedned case has no achorage for the 6 HDDs. You will have to get a hotbox swap multi drive box or a different case - neither cost is factored into the recommended setup.

Yeah. I figured this out today when a 4 bay 3.5” HDD enclosure arrived. Already have two drives installed and could only get 2 in the enclosure to work. I have two M.2 installed.

So yeah. Some wasted money and a build that wont do as described.

I guess maybe a PCIe to SATA?

 

[Mikezuzia]

Yeah. I figured this out today when a 4 bay 3.5” HDD enclosure arrived. Already have two drives installed and could only get 2 in the enclosure to work. I have two M.2 installed.

So yeah. Some wasted money and a build that wont do as described.

I guess maybe a PCIe to SATA?

That's a great recommendation!