Chia mining is apparently “hot.” It’s hard for me to tell because I’ve been siloed in my workshop now for about two weeks working on building a plotting and farming rig… I’m ready to publish something. These aren’t really findings as much as just my notes, but this is what I’ve learned.
I’ve definitely hit the wall in regards to building these rigs… It’s just such a slow process.
- The Chia network software is barebones. There isn’t a lot to it, and once you stop plotting you have to start over. You can’t resume failed plots.
- The numbers people have for CPU/mem/plots in parallel for me were nearly worthless. I haven’t been able to run 5 plots in parallel on one temp drive… I’m currently running 5 plots, but they are using separate SSDs on my rig, and they are also “queued”. I will start a set of 29 plots, wait a while and then start another… this way I have the load rolling on my CPU I’ve got 88 plots in the last 5 days this way. If I try to do parallels… it crashes on me.
- Striping drives together works great. You can share the load amongst multiple drives. I striped 3 2TB SSDs and they are working well. I haven’t been able to max them out load wise… but I’m running 2 queues on them.
- Linux–Using ubuntu linux has the same interface as the windows version, I had some issues with the linux rig I was building–I’ll follow up later.
- I’m still working on ways to create network shares so I can build a bunch of plotters and all go to my big array of drives.
- I’ve ordered 4x Intel Xeons with 18 cores each… that will give me 72 cores. The CPU issue is the biggest bottle neck.
I’ve been mining now for 8 days, no XCH won yet…