Home Networking: Chia Home Farming setup overview
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- Опубликовано: 6 май 2021
- Chia is a new cryptocurrency that is trying to do things differently, instead of relying on CPU or GPU horsepower it works by utilizing empty HDD space, costing a whole lot less power then current cryptocurrencies. That's all fine and good but as it turns out it's also a SysAdmins dream to setup and manage. Lots of planning goes into designing the whole setup and tuning it for maximum performance to what your available hardware can deliver!
So let's take a look together how I've set this up and if there is enough demand we'll deep dive into how to setup an optimized plotter PC and linking it all together so you can also farm some Chia!
To re-emphasize what is also said in the video a few times, I do not plan on deep diving into Chia the cryptocurrency itself or anything related to the crypto project, even it's potential use or not, but mainly plan to produce some videos about the surrounding technical subjects!
░▒▓[Associated blog post & Mentioned in the video]▓▒░
Info gathering post: blog.quindorian.org/2021/05/c...
░▒▓[Shopping links]▓▒░
❕ All below links can be affiliate links which provide me with a small kickback in case you purchase something. If you use them, thank you very much! :D ❕
Recommended products for Chia farming:
🌟 Recommended SSDs for Temp Storage 🌟
👉 Corsair MP510 960GB: geni.us/YtUFpj
👉 Samsung 970Pro 1TB: geni.us/1EBm9z
👉 Samsung 980Pro 1TB: geni.us/8wT2K
🌟 Recommended HDDs for Plot Storage 🌟
👉 Seagate External 10TB+: geni.us/gLfL3S
👉 WD External 10TB+:geni.us/I4xu
🌟 Accessories 🌟
👉 M.2 cooling heatsinks: geni.us/RGAWk
👉 PCIe to M.2 adapter for adding more NVMe drives: geni.us/BKXWZ84
👉 Orico USB hubs:
Amazon: geni.us/SfQwl
Aliexpress: s.click.aliexpress.com/e/_Anh4c3
🌟 Recommended plotter PC Components 🌟
👉 Case - Be Quiet 500DX: geni.us/BNNdty
👉 Motherboard - Asus x570 Prime-Pro: geni.us/T9usX
👉 CPU - Ryzen 9 5900x: geni.us/gReTaf
👉 Cooler - Scythe Mugen 5 (PCGH): geni.us/EOVDBA
👉 Memory - 32GB 3600Mhz: geni.us/6G0G
👉 Power Supply - Seasonic 550w: geni.us/PAi7cD
🌟 Mini PCs 🌟
👉 J4125 Gemini Lake Refresh Mini PC
(Excellent little machine, configurable up to 16GB of memory!)
Amazon: geni.us/Eqt9vR
Aliexpress (the one I have): s.click.aliexpress.com/e/_ACHTKT
👉 Intel 10th Gen i5-10210u Quad-Core Mini PC
(Great little machines, less so for plotting, but great as a VM host for instance, configurable up to 32GB of memory!)
Amazon: geni.us/UBzUH
Aliexpress: s.click.aliexpress.com/e/_AoixxN
░▒▓[Music]▓▒░
Intro&Outro
TheFatRat - Xenogenesis
( • TheFatRat - Xenogenesi... ) 
Хобби
Also make sure to check out the second video: ruclips.net/video/LRNjVVIeLto/видео.html and third video: ruclips.net/video/lv2avfUiBKk/видео.html in this series! Also I've been filling the linked article in the video description with more tips and tricks.
Would be nice to see a full tutorial 👍
Nice
Great video! Thanks for showing your setup! Would love to see a deep dive on how to set things up, or even a deeper dive on your setup.
Enjoyed this, my mate has talked about Chia, but I haven't had a chance to look into it, this was a good video. Keep them coming.
Tonight a buddy and I spent almost 5 hours mapping out a build to do both plotting and farming and agreed at the end that it needed to be separate. We have the plotting down but I was tasked with figuring out the farming side. This honestly has made my night as I basically have everything but the mini computer so I know what I'm ordering now. Keep up the great content and I can't wait to see more!
A full tutorial on Linux will be great. ( Linux for dummies ) 😂
many thanks for your time and for sharing your knowledge 🤗
very interesting, I for one would like a deeper dive on your setup. Great video :)
Yes please, more technical side of chia. And we want budget building of a plotter!!
very interested in more videos... I love how you are splitting the farming and plotting... I'm interested in this approach. MOre VIDS!
Great video!! I cant wait to see the plotter video!
Thanks for sharing your setup!
Well I have been thinking about this for awhile, nice setup and I look forward to future videos
Thank you for the interesting video. I will watch 2 and 3!!
This vid got me interested on how the setup is done, so love to see a tutorial.
As for content: Applause for diversity !
I'd love to see this!
Nice information...and yes would love to see more plotting and farming build and technical videos.
super helpful, thanks for sharing!
Would like to see more. Interesting topic. Specially since some ssd manufacturers say plotting will void warranty because of the load.
Long time subscriber.
10:30 *great* callout about going direct USB vs Over the Network - had always assumed I would setup external storage over network but this changed my mind.
I been doing crypto since 2014. Thanks for your insight on Chia.
👍 looking forward to more chia tutorials!
Nice video, more on Chia plz.
thank you so much for your valuable knowledge please guide us more
You did so quick on plotting. It is amazing. It would be helpful if you can share your experience on your plot scheme :).
Def want more content. Long term sub here!
Thnx for letting me know, I really was twisted both ways if I should talk about this topic or not. :)
@@IntermitTech Bindge watching your videos.Great stuff!
nice vid, cheers man. good to know that i should shuck those drives with the usb's on the front!
Hello, it's a such a great experience for me. So useful info!! . So bad that i've not found your vid earlier. Anyways, thank you so much! Hugs from Russia :)
Great to see cross content, heard about chia few weeks ago.
Great video. Would it be possible to share a video on how to setup a similar rig with only one pc plotting and farming with external hard drives. Thanks.
Great video. Caught my eye because there aren't many videos on usb setups. Would like to know more about connection between separate plotter and harvester.
I interested in the set up for chia it’s very helpful
Yes, would love a tutorial on this to start from scratch. Would like to know how much temp the setup generates as I stay in a tropical environment all year long. Also like to see your ROI to know what the size of setup would make sense. Thanks!
Great vid! Chia has already jacked up the prices on drives. Maybe some vids about durablity tests and cost calculations? Thanks Quin!😊
Please do a full video with all the good stuff
It'd be awesome to see an in-depth dive into how you set it all up
Thank you 😊🌱👍
Very interesting video, I would Defiantly be interested in learning more about how to build one of these.
Keen for more
I Like this video. Support
do you think it is better to do farming using external or internal HDD ?
I am worried about durability problems when using External HDD because it is not designed for 7 X 24 use.
What do you think? please input from you.
More chia please!
Hi Quin. I would love to see any and all information you can provide. Your LED stuff is amazing and I can't wait for CHIA.
Glad to hear it! :D
Fantastic video ☺️ Please do a vid for getting setup
Cant wait
If I buy a PCI-e usb card, do you think I'll be able to connect more devices to a single hub?
My own experiments shown that Intel root hubs have limit on total bandwidth, not number of devices. I could previously connect 4x4 hub + up to 12-13 hard drives to a single USB3 port, but once I've plugged the same hub into USB2 port, I can now connect the 4x4 hub + full 16 drives and at least 1 extra drive into a USB3 port sitting on the same root hub.
Yes but no. USB2 is a different driver and instead of the 32 devices limit of XHCI it has a 127 device limit. Adding root bridges with a PCIe card would however work, since that's a new root bridge and the limit is per root bridge only.
Can anybody tell me can we connect 7 only ubs external hdd to a usb hub and it you run fine?
Please continue with Chia Farming videos. Budget farming options without plotting or pool-plotting. Thanks!
Once you plot from Big1, can you simply unplug the hard drive and connect it to a less pwoerfull machine to farm ?
In theory yes, but I generally leave them and plot them over the network immediately from the central farmer. And I also do bulk moves to make more space.
@@IntermitTech so once plotted, you leave them there farming. What is you run out of usb/gb/s ? New machine ?
I'm a channel subscriber and starting plotting/farming Chia. I'm starting really basic. Just ordered an 8TB external HDD and 1TB SSD, but planning to double both soon and add more HDDs in the future. What I think would be really interesting: How to build a budget machine with good performance dedicated to Chia, maybe using one of those X99 dual socket motherboards and cheap Xeon CPUs and how to exchange your XCH into EUR/USD. Also, as soon as official pools are available, a tutorial on that would be nice too. 😎
Nice! Yeah, I'm working on a build guide for a plotter, not so much budget but one that will do 40 - 50 plots a day. :)
That's nice too. Waiting for it. 😊
great stuff! I would love to hear more! I am trying to separate the functions of plotting and harvesting but so far I have no idea how to do that. I currently have 4 full nodes pushing to a freenas and will be putting together a few raspberry pi's with a bunch of usb drives just running samba. Not ideal!
Thanks man
great video, more tutorials :)
Yes more info and also a question once the plot it ready or the Hdd its full you unplug and move it to the farmer?
Yes sure, that's a way of doing it.
Can you compare setups using madmax plotter?
I have a question on the storage of the plots after completion. I've taken a look and you reference using NFS, or moving the drives completely. Would you be able to expand a little more on this? Do you use the mini pc as an NFS server and mount it on the Plotter and share it out that way, or do you use the Plotter as an NFS server and mount on the farmer and share that way? Do you have automated transfers that move to the farmer and then auto-configure the farmer the new plots are on the new drives? Getting started and looking to automate as much as possible.
Yes currently that MiniPC has 8x 14TB attached which are now full, I wrote to it over the network (using NFS) so now it's just farming. You can automate those transfers if you want in plotman using the archive function.
@@IntermitTech Thanks mentioning plotman put me down the right path. When setting up your 8 x 14TB drives, what file system are you using? Are you using JBOD? I ask as if I'm using externals, and a drive dies, I only want to lose the data on that drive, but I also want to reduce administration if possible by setting up a mount for each drive, which then has to be configured on plotman (it seems).
Update:
Answered my own question, leaving here for others:
github.com/ericaltendorf/plotman/wiki/Archiving#set-up-rsync-daemon-rsyncd
Mount all drives as a sub directory and rsync will use all drives under that directory.
How then does the farmer know of the new plots in the archive?
Please make the farming tutorial! Love your videos!
Small tip when you are going to be running a lot of external USB disks, make sure to run them in "usb-storage" mode and not "uas" I've seen issues with that mode when there is a lot going on on the disks.
where do you set this as im using external harddrives?
I would also like to know this please.
Thanks for the info on those seagate drives with extra usbs in them 👍
Would love to know how to setup a JBOD harvester over 10GBe link. I heard using netcat to transfer the data is the best method. So just looking into a tutorial on how to do that.
Question:
Can you daisy chain the hard drives and essentially use all the ports? Or would this not be efficient?
Do you move the USB HDDs off of your plotters to your farming rig once the drive is full?
Generally I have transfers running over the network so they never really fill up.
Would love in depth technical. Started with 10G network and truenas smb share struggled even with 10GB nic. Think it must be sas2 hba in pcie2x8? Not sure how to find bottle neck but am in the process of moving to unraid for single volume ext4 shares
As a start, ditch SMB and use NFS. You have no issues whatsoever with transfer speeds or latency when doing something this simple over the network really. I use USB3 drives shared over NFS, no issues whatsoever. The idea is to make the video series more in depth as we go.
@@IntermitTech really appreciate the reply and will do. Have a sas2 jbod the sm45. But yea will be ditching truenas and using Ubuntu server to nfs share each drive
We want it!!!
long term sub here. Great channel and love the golden nuggets in this video! How many external hard drives can a normal PC accommodate? The reason being, only 8tb are mostly available everything above 8tb is sold out or back ordered.
Thnx! :D Yeah, if you get the drives without a USB hub, a single root hub could easily handle 16 drives or so (wouldn't go too much beyond that). And if you have multiple root hubs, well, you can do that again.
@@IntermitTech good idea. Thanks
Love to get more info about the detailed set up :)
Where did you get those nice strong storage racks (schabben in dutch)?
Thanks.
Cool, thnx for letting me know!
In the Netherlands the Praxis has them "Sencys opbergrek Jumbo 200kg"
curious to know a lot more about this and if , for example, an AMD A10 would do
Make detailed chia network design, farming/harvest/plotting machines setup, security considerations and ideally monitoring. That would be awesome!
Please make more technical videos about Chia farming.
hello thanks for your great video have a question how much memory we need for 127 plots? is 32gig enough ?!
To farm plots its almost nothing, to make the plots its around 3GB per parallel plot to take into account
@Intermit.Tech What kind of computer are you mining Chia cryptocurrency for your hard drives? I understand that Chian mining on the computer would be good to have more spec? What kind of specs does your Chia miner computer have, and how many days does it take to fill one external hard drive?
So how do you move a full external hard drive to this shelf for share or cultivation? You have to turn off your USB hard drive so how do you get it then shared on your farm? Apparently need a command file?
Wow, Euhm, you need to read their Wiki a bit more I think. But no moving of drives, it's all networked together. :)
@@IntermitTech It would make me really much easier if you could add automatic subtitles to your videos :) Then I could choose Finnish subtitles, and it would be easier for me to understand you :) I'm not good enough in English yet :D
Hey that was good. Yeah can you run a how to. I am sourcing a pc and wondering CPU performance required. Would i7 processor be ok. Also how much ram for the pc
check the second video ;)
Hi man, how would be your setup if you only have 6mb of internet? i have all the hardware and a case that fill 18 hard drive, but dont know if i need a big internet plan like yours, here in my country it does not exist
Poh, 6Mbit might be not be enough to keep up with the network sync...
Great video. Thanks a ton. Would it ve possible to get a tutorial on how to set up Linux for plotting and farming? Thanks again for the best content on chia farming and plotting.
Hi. Thank you for the video.
One question, if I buy the mini PC, I don't need to buy all the other components, except the USB hub and the HDD's... That's right?!
Well it really depends what you want to do with it? If it's going to become a farmer and you want to connect USB3 drives you are correct, only need the USB hub and drives.
And how much time to create a plot?!
It will depend heavily on your machine, but with a good setup around 5 to 6 hours is possible.
I loved the video and how technical you are, the more technical the better, I'm an considering using external hard drives for farming but Ive read about issues with them disconnecting randomly from the computer, did you run into things like that? If so, how did you solve it? Bring us that nice technical view of yours!
I have not any such issues, but you should look into configuring them with "USB-Storage" instead of the "UAS" driver as I've listed in my article, since I did that, 0 issues, 16 drives only right now.
Great content really helpful ) Whats the advantage of using NSF over CIFS?
I don't run windows systems! NFS is much faster.
I'm curious - for the power draw in that room, did you have a separate 50amp service pulled into that room and distributed across the power strips? I'm assuming you aren't just running everything in that room into the same 15amp service?
Hahaha, power usage is much lower then you'd expect! Each disk idles at 4.5w , reads around 5.5w and max usage is 8w. Even with 20x 8w that's only 160w!
Then each big machine let's say takes 150w each. And some misc stuff also 50w, now we're talking 160w + 150w + 150w + 50w = ~510w total, no worries at all for a 230v/16Amp circuit. :)
@@IntermitTech oh damn - I hadn't done the hand calculation yet and didn't realize those drives were so low power - most excellent!
What would you say is a cost effective configuration to farm 5PB?
Woah, euh, bunch of thread rippers connected over 25/40Gbit? Multiple harvester boxes with 12G SAS connected JBODs
Seems like an interesting way to Pre-Clear drives before shucking 😅
Is it possible to take your plots offline, place the disks in a closet for the next 20 years, and then sell your XCH when the time comes?
No, plots need to be actively farmed. Once you earn XCH well you can keep that in an offline wallet if you desire.
Any advantage of running plotters and farmers in a proxmox cluster ?
You could run your farmer as a VM but other then that, not really. You could use idle resources of the cluster to plot and farm though?
Thanks.
Are those external storage drives not designed to be daisy chained ? Hence the 2 port USB Hubs on the front of them?? If they are, then why not connect them that way?
It had no benefit vs how I do it now? They still count as the same amount for the root hub. Also you'll be stringing more parts behind each other potentially creating failure points which can bring a whole lot down together. And also limiting bandwidth.
@@IntermitTech Good point. Was looking at 15tb tape drives this week and wondering if possible cos apparently its only every 18 sec an award is given from chia so that plenty of time for a tape drive to access apparently good tape drives can have access of 300mb/sec
Yeah no, throughput of a tape is pretty good, just it's latency is in the minutes.... That won't work.
The investment you have made in hardware and time seems great. How much have you spent and how long before you make any money? Will we see the market flooded with burnt out drives and rising prices for normal users as demand exceeds supply and planet runs out of rare metals needed. And what about CO2 cost of all the coal power generated electricity for the farms? More questions that answers!
I don't understand what u said about the Seagate backup hub plus drives , since I ordered some myself care to elaborate? Will it limit me somehow on the farmer pc ? I have calculated I can put max 20 USB drives per farmer with USB hubs will those drives take extra slots and why? Or did u perhaps mean when plotting?
Each drive is seen as 4 devices and a root hub can only have 32. Thus max 8 drives and nothing else can be connected to a single root hub, not even keyboard for instance.
@@IntermitTech Do i need to buy a 32 port usb hub then ? , cause i bought 10 port ones (i only have 8 of those drives 12 TB ones) or am i good with a 10 port usb hub?
I have 2 farmers , which i plan to populate with 32 drives , so i bought 4 x 10 usb port hubs , 2 for one pc and 2 for the other for a total of 40 ports. 8 out of the 32 disks i have are those Seagate Backup hub plus , am i ok like that ? cause in chia discord where i asked they said nothing wrong/bad about those drives
Ok i just understood that your device has a single usb port and a single xCHI that's why u have that problem... i am using a normal pc with like 5 usb 3.0 ports so i guess that covers it.
Whut? No, more ports won't help as I explained...
Great video, I’m new here. couldn’t you connect the drives together and daisy chain them? Would that not be 1 less wasted channel?
Still takes up the same amount of logical devices on the root hub and would be way more bandwidth limited and single points of failure. :)
@@IntermitTech Fair enough 👍🏼 just ordered 8 more 8TB drives last night but I guess I’ll cancel them and change to the normal Seagate Expansions. Glad I found this video and thanks for the heads up!
How are you ... My question is, if I make the plots and leave them to grow only in the Chia program, without linking to any pool, will these plots work in the "official" partner pool?
What is the validity of current pools?
I have a computer ready, but I didn't start the plots for fear of making a mistake with the update of the "partner" pools.
What do I do?
There is lots of information about this out there, it no. All current plots will not be usable in a pool, only solo farming. And update will come where you can make "poolable" plots in the future.
@@IntermitTech will I have to delete the current plots and reploting again?
and the news from the "official" pool would be released today, but nothing has been confirmed, and I do not understand why plots not linked in any pool, created only for soil cultivation cannot be used in a "partner" pool in the future.
What is the estimated ROI at current stock price for this setup? I would like to replicate the setup but I am a complete ignorant in this field.
I think you need to review your opinion about sharing your plots over the network because Chia has it's own harvester/farmer network protocol that is very lightweight and communicate on a secure channel (basically just a signaling protocol)
Interesting. How are the Temps of the HDDs? I know for a fact, that External HDDs are getting pretty Toasty and i personally like my drives under 40 °C (but not too cold of course). How is the wear on the NVMEs and what is your RoI for all of this? Seems pretty expensive, ngl. I tried Chia myself, just for fun with 500GB Spare Space in a VM. Performance was as shit as the Setup sounds like, lol.
Currently the external drives hover between 40c and 50c. :)
Hello =)
I started something similar.. limited to 6 12Tb HDD though as there is almost nothing else available on market ^^"
ANyway
I have two machines plotting, and I want one of them to farm. BUt whenever my first machine finishes to plot, it automatically tries to farm. What shouldI do about it? Would it be a problem if two machines are farming?
Which one will be considered by the network? The GUI is not well done regarding this and I did not find many info online..
Thanks :-)
Nice setup by the way.
Ah my advice was to stop using the guy on the plotting machines, install linux and do it using plotman CLI, it'll also give you much better speeds.
@@IntermitTech Any chance of an "idiots" guide on how to do chia on linux please.
I suspect I'm not the only one wanting to get into Linux a bit more.
Thank you for your content, much appreciated 👍 👍
Thanks for the video, really interesting the CHIA theme, i hope you do more videos about it, as you make it them very interesting. One thing that i would love if you can expand is the USB hubs, i really got confused, you seem to imply that for you Orico 7 ports are work the best for you, and sabrent 16 port its not that good, but is this is a limitation because of 2 port you external hdd have or 7 port is a restiction of USB roots? and if thats so, why do we see 10 ports and 16 ports being sold? im just really confused on this subject.
It's because of the external HDD type, it takes up a lot of devices. Also like the Via chipset more then the Realtek chipset.
@@IntermitTech Thanks for the response. So a Single USB HUB can take a bigger USB hub if the HDD didn't have 2 ports. Do you know a VIA based USB HUB that has 13-16 usb?
May I know whether you have made some win after using 1.5 weeks ?
Would raid improve the performance instead of using SSD?
I have, yes.
I believe for my setups the R0 helps keeping the CPUs busy.
@@IntermitTech thank you. Your video helps! Hope you could do a tutorial on raidz setup. As using SSD will decrease the lifespan of the SSD
Nice video, but why are you using default nvme drives, just get the enterprise nvme, because you will be toasting those end user nvme's in 3 months...
Can you go more indepth on how al these drives are added to your farming machine, are they setup as one volume or are these all seperate volumes?
Well sure, but prices would still work out the same and once I'm done plotting I have no real use for the drives anymore.
Each USB disk is it's own volume so if one would die, not too much lost
@@IntermitTech Price wise you have some nice options, but the life span of the enterprise drive is longer.
I'm using U.2 -> M.2 StarTech adapters and they work great, they also have pcie U.2 adapters.
For the farmer i will be using a 90€ 16 channel Adaptec Raid adapter.
Cheap option for having 16 drives in one PC.
Ah yeah that Adaptec sounds nice! But I do have some Jbod plans for in the future, for now USB allows me to scale out easily.
And the lifespan of the consumer SSDs is much longer for this workload then most people think, so I believe it'll be fine and they'll all have plenty left even after plotti g 350TB.
Very nice but why buy the hubs when the drives have hubs that other drive can connect to. Cant you connect two drive to one drive and then have possibly one hub for all drives
Sadly connecting the drive through the big hub or the onboard hub makes no difference to the total amount of devices connected to the root hub, so yes you can do that if you have a smaller hub, but it won't make a difference in regards to max devices.
it would be awesome if you made a video on how to build a JBOD for framing chia
There might be something like that in the future. :)
I hadn't heard of Chia yet, so I clicked because I was curious how you were adding some hydroponics growing chia to your home network.
Yeah, the name can be confused at first, I've seen a few Chia seeds go by while doing my own research. ;)
Im taking my ether miners and going to add a high power ssd to plot. What do you actually profit a day off of this investment? I have 24 TB to start.
Can't be said right now, once pooling becomes more of a thing, it'll be easier to calculate.
Intermit.Tech whats your stagering timing have the same set up
25 mins
I like seeing decentralization and getting away from (practical) monopolies in computing (especially in finance and storage), but I also don't like seeing prices rise so high for tech, but I understand how supply and demand works (and economic terrorism by closing businesses didn't help either). Too bad we're being throttled at the supply-side (intentionally or unintentionally). My only regret is that I can't join the fun and set up storage farms, but at least I'll enjoy watching others build up the future, so I'm pretty excited for this mini-series.
Wow, nice comment! :D
Great video! Do you do solo or did you join a pool?
For now everyone is solo, once pooling because available, not sure yet. :)
Full tutorial please and if is it possible to help me to set up my farm I mean the steps etc. :-)
Is there a way that you know of to bypass the windows limit of external hard drives that can be connected? I read that once you hit drive z thats it, is this true, cool vid dude.
Ah, using drive letters is old, you can make as many mount points as you want I think? (Yes, this has been in Windows for ages!). Just go to disk management, remove the drive letter and link the drive to a directory.