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To clarify, it's the supply chain that is destroyed, not the hard drives themselves. Most Chia miners appear to be using enterprise SSDs to "farm" a plot. And c
by JohnTHaller 5y ago
To clarify, it's the supply chain that is destroyed, not the hard drives themselves. Most Chia miners appear to be using enterprise SSDs to "farm" a plot. And consumer SSDs can't really stand up to this process long term, so they get killed relatively quick.
A typical plot is around 100GB and officially takes around 356GB (and a lot of SSD thrashing) to farm. Then that plot is copied off to long term storage (larger, slow hard drives via SATA, USB, etc) where it sits until a given plot of yours "wins". You can run one of these collections of hard drives off a Raspberry Pi.
Fun fact: In other crypto there are pools so that everyone contributing work gets a share of the profit. There are no pools in Chia. You're farming a digital lottery ticket that then sits there using up hard drive space and an always on PC hoping one off your tickets wins.
I researched it a bit so I'd understand the basics and the cost to earnings setup. It's so wasteful of hardware and space that I didn't want to set up a rig, though.
- antisthenes 5y agoSo, question from a complete noob: Can the thrashing of space be done on a RAMdisk, preventing SSD wear? Thereby only the 100GB would be moved onto long term storage, e.g. primary SSDs. Is that worthwhile? Does RAM speed matter in this case?
- xtracto 5y agoYes, ram speed matters A LOT . That's what is called "temporary storage" in Chia, and people who mine look for the fastest SSDs to mine faster. The big problem is whether you can setup a 400GB Ramdisk?
- skybrian 5y agoSpeed mattered a lot at the beginning because likelihood of winning was much higher (due to fewer people playing the game). I don't know if it still matters or it's too late now.
- JohnTHaller 5y agoIf you have 356GB of RAM per plot, sure.
- rambojazz 5y agoPlease don't give new ideas to miners, RAM is already expensive as it is now :)
- rambojazz 5y agoWhat are some examples of "enterprise SSD"? I actually would like to buy one because I suppose they are way more durable than consumer SSDs, and less likely to die on me. But the closest to "enterprise" that I can find are the samsung pro.
- JohnTHaller 5y agoSomething like the Intel Data Center SSDs: https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/products/details/memory-storage/data-center-ssds.html https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/products/details/mem... They measure lifespan in petabytes instead of terabytes. Or data writes per day (DWPD).