$2.60!!! lol pls don’t forget about me! 
Your wife is very lucky! Hope she’s not shopping at name brand stores lol.
Like this? 
Perfect. Exactly that!
Update. Just added 2 x 4TB full disks to the main farming rig and am now farming 210 plots. Slow boat to China. It is up 52% from my previous total, so happy about that. Meantime, it is taking me a lot longer than I thought to set up the farm I bought. Nevermind - the journey is great. Still buying stuff faster than I can put it to use earning money. At least I won’t get bored with nothing to do.
I understand. I’m still trying to figure out what the best low-energy farming solution is for me. Keep plottin like a super villain!
FWIW if you turn up your debug log you can check your proof time on Windows systems using:
Get-Content “~/.chia/mainnet/log/debug.log” -Wait -Tail 30 | select-string -pattern “plots were eligible” -encoding ASCII
Are you farming solo ? Having started in July I joined a pool.
Yep. I started before the pool protocol was there. I’m sure I’d make more in a pool, but afaik that requires re-plotting. I do prefer being my own little disadvantaged island for some reason. It’s like my personal daily mini-lotto. lol. 
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I have attached my rather poor start to farming. I just had to reboot the farm because of an early morning power cut due to some lively LED lights in the kitchen. Same spur as the workshop. Anyway, I am going to race you to 800 and see who gets there first. 
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Challenge accepted! I think I can crank it up and abuse these NVMEs a bit more before they melt on me!!
That’s the spirit. This week I have bought two second hand SSD drives, 2TB each. I see you saying “mistake - these will die any minute”, as an engineer, I am prepared to take that risk. The second hand units have been tested for TBW that equates to around 50% of their maximum value and I paid about 55% of new price for each of these. My interpretation of survival of SSD drives (or NVMe drives) is that the specified TBW numbers are based on warranties and so are conservative. I have the same statistical approach to using eight year old enterprise hard drives. In my work as an IT technical project manager I have observed drives that are well past their five year end of support and into their 10 year end of practical life. The systems get replaced more and more frequently as corporates move more and more storage capacity first to datacentres and then on to cloud, or even cold storage. For large companies, these are multi-million dollar, five year programmes so hard disk availability of old drives is not going to dry up any time soon.
My drive database (50% complete) will track hours in use and restarts, and will contain a link to a CrystalDiskInfo sheet. This will serve as my “drive replacement plan” as I inevitably move from 2TB drives up to 18TB drives in a cost controlled manner somewhat in line with earnings from the farm. For plotting, I will run these till they die, as long as I always have a clone backup of each. These are insurance policies against the loss of the main drive I purchased with the farm last month. I will clone the existing 2TB drive. I am yet to be able to confirm (but believe it to be the case) that the system I have bought can generate about 20 plots per day, and that is 3 times my current system rate of 7 per day. I have gone a bit overboard on buying (I usually do that), and seriously think that I don’t need to buy any more “bits” until I get to about 2,000 plots in total. I have my 210 plots currently on seven drives attached to a Windows 10 tower on a 10 year old system (my son’s broken gaming tower), and that is more than adequate as a farm / harvester.
I now need to complete the transition of the 1,000 plot farm I bought so that it remains farming - I have had some day work to do in between so am behind with that goal. Once I get that “1,000 plot income stream” set up, I will continue to plot on my other 80TB blank storage, building one or two other systems, the first being a Raspberry PI that can farm the existing plots I bought. I will then use the plotter PC I bought with the farm to plot new plots until I fill the 80TB, then gradually move the single farmer plots from the existing Chia account to a new Chia destination to collect farming rewards. When I finish (I have given myself to end of December) I will have a 1,800 plot capacity or thereabouts (200 TiB). At current values I think that will generate about $400 per month gross and a target $300 per month net of electricity and other “improvement” costs. Of course, that could be $100 per month, or could be $900 per month. Depends on others and their appetite for hard work, patience and determination. I am just coming up to 0,1 Chia in total, so this can only go one way, so I need to get those 1,000 plots on line as soon as I can without getting too much distracted with life’s more boring chores.
That’s awesome! I can only crank out like 8-10 plots per day on my system.
CrystalDiskInfo is great! I’ve used it before.
I love all the stuff you’re doing, especially the whole solar thing. I’m thinking about how to get funky with my setup. Doin some research on Pi alternatives opened my eyes to the proliferation of single board computers out there! For my farming rig, I think I’m gonna look for one with eMMC storage so my proof times stay low and try to get creative with it. I’m picturing a bronze Cthulhu statue with HDD activity blinking eyes and tentacles holding 14TB HDDs or something fun like that. 
I can’t wait to see your artistic version of a farmer. Check out the crystaldiskinfo on two second hand drives I bought that arrived yesterday. Both are reporting 99%, and their write history is the equivalent of generating 1 and 13 Chia plots respectively. They have obviously not been used by a Chia plotter LOL.
I am going to clone the existing 2TB drive on the farm I bought and put this in a drawer to protect against a total loss of the current plotter. The other one I will figure out whether I build a second plotter or not. It is certainly overkill for a farmer/harvester.
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Ding!
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It’s hot in there! Maybe some water cooling with fancy lights is in order, or moving to Iceland.
After a bunch of interwebbing, I’m leaning towards a Mac mini. Only uses ~40w of juice, tiny form factor, and should be able to both farm and plot for me. Plotosaurus has to go! That beast is costing me ~$150 / mo. to run.
Some pics attached. The current version of the dinosaur Win10 machine hosting 5 internal and 6 external drives. With hindsight, and with an intermediate build, I am going for Wintel and cranking it up to 20+ drives in the external perspex housings with two fans per 8 drives. This will make use of my many cheap 2TB drives. At 11 drives it consumes 105 watts with the 24 inch monitor on and 85 watts with the monitor on standby. So that currently supports only 32TB of storage on 10 drives, but it could support up to 20 x 16TB = 320TB at an estimated power consumption of 200W total. On a 24x7 basis, that is currently 0.2kW x 24 hr x 30 days x £0.16/kWh = £23 / month. 282 plots up 15% from last week.
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Very cool setup. Thanks for sharing those details. Love the lights on the HD fans. I’ve never seen a HD cage like that.
I love it! Keep up the good work!
A result of my incessant search on eBay for “good deals”. I had a shorted 120x120mm fan in a new case - that one in the photo by the way - that took down the power supply on start up. I disconnected it since the environment was quite cold. I was surprised to see the rack rate just for case fans. Must be something to do with my scrapyard days when I was young.
Anyway, last week, knowing I needed a few fans for future I “braved” (can’t say I googled because I use a Brave browser) “job lot computer fans” and found quite a few multiple second hand fans for sale on eBay. I put a bid in an ended up buying 9 assorted fans for £6.26. To my delight, not only did this fix the new case fan problem, two of them were 80 x 80 that fit with the Chinese perspex 8-drive case. I didn’t know they were LED lit versions, so that was a pleasant surprise. When you are building a pilot project, I know from the past that costs add up. At the corporate level it is not unusual to spend twice the initial budget. So I tend to look at how to repurpose something I already have, or buy “broken” or used parts that others would turn down because “it is dressed in coveralls and looks too much like hard work”.
Regardless of how much time it takes me I am always very satisfied to build something under budget when the general attitude of others seems to be to just buy off the shelf what they need, then complain when the return on investment is miserable.
Chia is moving exactly like I wanted it to. It is now down by nearly 40% from its recent peak of $260. Though that goes against logic, it has two effects on my own participation of benefit. First, I am building out at < 50% of the cost of new components, and second, it will encourage a broader community of Chia farmers to give up even before they have started, and in the longer term that will produce cheaper second hand storage capacity worldwide. I expect that to happen with graphics cards in conventional crypto mining, but I have far more interesting earnings opportunities to pursue than BTC or ETH mining. And at far less cost.
I do suspect the power meter may be reading falsely. When it has run for a week I will be able to divide the total kWh by the duration the system has been running for a better estimate.