4 ms·

I have been thinking about trying Chia mining to learn about it but haven’t read the details. One video said that his HDD was only like 2x the time to farm a pl

I have been thinking about trying Chia mining to learn about it but haven’t read the details. One video said that his HDD was only like 2x the time to farm a plot compared to a SATA SSD and the real bottleneck is long term storage so I can’t see why anyone would be in such a rush that they would burn out their SSD. Haven’t looked too deeply into it yet though.

VectorLock 5y ago
Chia 'mining' is done in two phases. You create a 'plot' once which is very CPU, memory, and above all disk write/seek intensive. Then you can 'farm' that plot with low resources. Its the 'plotting' that chews up SSDs.
- calvinmorrison 5y ago
  Why not just use a large ramdisk as fake drive space? Plenty of commodity servers can handle over 256gb of ram
  - latch 5y ago
    Plotting is both CPU and IO bound. Plotting can't fully take advantage of multiple cores. The workaround is to start N plots, each taking ~400GB of space and ~2 cores. On an 8 core server with 2x800 GB SSD, you can do 4 plots in parallel. Assuming you only had 512GB of RAM, you'd only be able to do 1 plot at a time (since you need 400GB per plot). Plotting to RAM would need to be 4x faster, but it isn't since you'll be CPU bound. So it would be both slower and more expensive.
  - VectorLock 5y ago
    You need ~300Gb of 'temp' space per plotting process. So you could only do 1 plot on a system that with a fast SSD you could do 6 or more plots in parallel.
outsomnia 5y ago
Chia's problem is your chance of "winning" is directly proportional to the global number of participating plots. Adding plots costs 100GB a time, so an 8GB drive can get you about 80. If you want to double that, you must buy another drive. Double it again, two, four, eight drives etc, and they're like $200 each. The number of participating plots you are competing with though, is going up exponentially. That will double by itself in a couple of weeks. So people in at the ground floor, who premined, will do great, the whale-sized farming operations with a significant fraction of the lottery tickets will do great, for everybody else every hour dilutes their chance of "winning" anything.
- eeegnu 5y ago
  Was that meant to be 100MB each, or an 8TB drive?
  - outsomnia 5y ago
    8TB, once processed the default plots are 100GB and can live on slower media. While being created, they require 240GB of temp space on preferably faster media. That's where the SSD problem comes from, during creation the 240GB is thrashed, it is reused for every plot made. So an 8TB storage for finished plots implies 80 finished 100GB plots, which implies 80 x 240GB of thrashing on the SSD to produce them.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]

VectorLock 5y ago

Chia 'mining' is done in two phases. You create a 'plot' once which is very CPU, memory, and above all disk write/seek intensive. Then you can 'farm' that plot with low resources. Its the 'plotting' that chews up SSDs.

calvinmorrison 5y ago
Why not just use a large ramdisk as fake drive space? Plenty of commodity servers can handle over 256gb of ram
- latch 5y ago
  Plotting is both CPU and IO bound. Plotting can't fully take advantage of multiple cores. The workaround is to start N plots, each taking ~400GB of space and ~2 cores. On an 8 core server with 2x800 GB SSD, you can do 4 plots in parallel. Assuming you only had 512GB of RAM, you'd only be able to do 1 plot at a time (since you need 400GB per plot). Plotting to RAM would need to be 4x faster, but it isn't since you'll be CPU bound. So it would be both slower and more expensive.
- VectorLock 5y ago
  You need ~300Gb of 'temp' space per plotting process. So you could only do 1 plot on a system that with a fast SSD you could do 6 or more plots in parallel.

outsomnia 5y ago

Chia's problem is your chance of "winning" is directly proportional to the global number of participating plots. Adding plots costs 100GB a time, so an 8GB drive can get you about 80. If you want to double that, you must buy another drive. Double it again, two, four, eight drives etc, and they're like $200 each. The number of participating plots you are competing with though, is going up exponentially. That will double by itself in a couple of weeks. So people in at the ground floor, who premined, will do great, the whale-sized farming operations with a significant fraction of the lottery tickets will do great, for everybody else every hour dilutes their chance of "winning" anything.

eeegnu 5y ago
Was that meant to be 100MB each, or an 8TB drive?
- outsomnia 5y ago
  8TB, once processed the default plots are 100GB and can live on slower media. While being created, they require 240GB of temp space on preferably faster media. That's where the SSD problem comes from, during creation the 240GB is thrashed, it is reused for every plot made. So an 8TB storage for finished plots implies 80 finished 100GB plots, which implies 80 x 240GB of thrashing on the SSD to produce them.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]