Chia notes

The default plotter is much harder to get going in a nice plot creation rhythm then say madmax. You can also use the madmaxie or similar windows based madmax frontend or stotiks default one is even easier. You dont have to have more then say 2 ssd's in a raid0 (software windows raid0 is fine) to start with.

A couple days later - up to one TB plotted as of this morning and the dashboard is showing something more realistic in the average byterate field. I am noticing another oddity though - it has been saying that there have been 36 shares in the last two hours for 24 hours now. Due to the variance expected in any type of mining, seems odd that it would report exactly 36 shares in two hours for a long period of time - or maybe I just don't understand and Chia shares work differently.

DigitalSpaceport wrote: The default plotter is much harder to get going in a nice plot creation rhythm then say madmax. You can also use the madmaxie or similar windows based madmax frontend or stotiks default one is even easier. You dont have to have more then say 2 ssd's in a raid0 (software windows raid0 is fine) to start with.

I will look at the madmax plotter, though have to see how easy it is to get up and running under FreeBSD. Is it more efficient than the default plotter or just easier to sequence? I am not plotting using an SSD - I don't want to run out and buy a fancy drive and trash it - rather am setting up an array of 12 10K rpm 600 GB SAS drives and assigning each one as a temp drive to a separate plotting process - sending the completed plots to an array of larger SATA and SAS drives. I have lots of older drives...and lots of drive bays...and if I fill up the drive bays I have a couple of large sas expander enclosures I can add.

It will take long at least for the Phase 2. Other than that it will work just fine. MadMax allows for assigning the number of thread to the plotting as well as staggering parallel plotting. With all things being equal it plots circles around the Chia GUI plotter. You can also plot on a system that does not have Chia installed. You just need to all a couple of keys.

robinsoz wrote:

DigitalSpaceport wrote: The default plotter is much harder to get going in a nice plot creation rhythm then say madmax. You can also use the madmaxie or similar windows based madmax frontend or stotiks default one is even easier. You dont have to have more then say 2 ssd's in a raid0 (software windows raid0 is fine) to start with.

I will look at the madmax plotter, though have to see how easy it is to get up and running under FreeBSD. Is it more efficient than the default plotter or just easier to sequence? I am not plotting using an SSD - I don't want to run out and buy a fancy drive and trash it - rather am setting up an array of 12 10K rpm 600 GB SAS drives and assigning each one as a temp drive to a separate plotting process - sending the completed plots to an array of larger SATA and SAS drives. I have lots of older drives...and lots of drive bays...and if I fill up the drive bays I have a couple of large sas expander enclosures I can add.

You can also raid0 stripe a large array of spindle drives into a really fast temp drive. I have done 15 7200 drives in a raid0 spindle and it was ~1.7GB/s sustained on writes with decent latency as well.