Wow, I didn’t see this first time around. Very well done. My miserable total is 0.15 Chia, but I have patience.
I 'd love to have over 1000 plots on line by end of September, but my business plan says that happens end of December. At that stage I hope to actually have 2,000 plots farming on 2 or 3 systems. I already have almost all the hardware needed and the SSD capacity to produce the plots. About $400 per month before costs. We’ll just have to continue building, monitoring and reassessing against total storage globally and price of Chia tokens. Now imagine that times 10?
UPDATE - CHIAFARM2
I bought a motherboard bundle off eBay this week. It arrived yesterday. So last night I built it into a free maxi-tower I collected locally 3 months ago, added a 120GB Kingston SSD drive (that I forgot had a Win10 system loaded and the Chia executable from my early pilot days), decided to see if it would plot. So the D:\ drive is now one of those Samsung EVO 860s, with a trial 1TB spinning drive as final plot destination.
I left it on overnight to sync with the blockchain and left it plotting on the Madmax plotter - plotter.ps1 set to nine plots using 6 threads of the i7 2600K processor.
The MOBO bundle was a “minor faults” variety and only cost £60 delivered. Minor faults were one broken SATAIII port out of five (I don’t care), and possible PCIe 16 slot damage (I don’t care).
“Gigabyte GA-Z77-D3H Motherboard i7 2600-K CPU 16GB RAM minor faults”.
Whilst it is still catching up with the blockchain sync and will be ready by about 5am (I put the 120GB drive aside early August), it is managing to generate a plot every 4.3 hours, so 5.5 plots per day. I will now run this in parallel with the £209 PC I bought in July for a combined capacity of 11 plots per day. Excluding hard disk costs, the estimated total cost of this system is £200 including a new power supply I had in stock that cost £16 in a fire sale. The tower has 6 x 3.5 inch drive bays, two bays I managed to fit the 2 x SSD 2.5 inch disks into, space in the old 5.25 inch bay for a 4 drive stack, and will be used with one external perspex stack of 10 drives. I will need 4 x 4 SATA III or 2 x 8 SATA III cards in PCI slots to complete the data capacity of 20 drives. It will start its life hosting 20 x 2TB drives that will gradually be increased to up to 20 x 16TB drives - a total of 360TB. Same for the pilot CHIAFARM1 machine in a similar maxi-tower case. I am now aiming for the petabyte club, but how fast I get there will depend on opportunity cost of hard drives, price of Chia tokens and total committed space globally. Incremental cost benefit is looking like between 9 months and 18 months time to payback - slightly less than at the end of the pilot 31Aug21.
Now this is running, I will turn my full attention to bringing back on line the farm I bought mid August.
318 plots now live, with another 36 to add on Friday. 0.17 Chia harvested to date. 8 months estimated time to win.
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Wow Mondeoman… best of luck to you sir! I want to see a pic when it’s all up and running!
Hi @enickma,
It gets better. When I bought 15 x 4TB drives back in late July, I took a 50 mile drive to collect them. They had been removed from a Hikvision CCTV chassis that had 16 hot bays. The seller had been told by his employer to render the CCTV system unusable, so he had cut some wires and partly destroyed the guts. He was sending it to the tip and when I asked him how much for it, it was free.
As a rack mountable chassis, it is great - only 4U high. After a great deal of navel gazing I realized that the chassis could host a microATX size PC motherboard. The problem I had was that the backplane of the chassis terminated in a socket that I did not recognize. The termination sockets combine four SATA III data connectors from the drive sockets on the backplane into a 36 pin socket, and use a 36 pin male to 36 pin male 1 ft cable to connect them to sockets on the bespoke board. It is not a PC motherboard but a dedicated 32 camera interface board.
Anyway all I want to use is the 16 x SATA III disk chassis. Power connectors are standard Molex. Data connectors were a problem. Yesterday, another motherboard arrived. This time, it is a H110 chipset board, microATX with only 4 SATA III ports and 3 PCIe slots. Haha, it fits physically into the Hikvision chassis. I can repair all the cut power cables with my trusty soldering iron abnd heat shrink cables (I can’t resist Lidl in the Middle, and buy loads of tools I think I will never use). Now to the data cables.
A search by their part number revealed an Amphenol product (says Amphenol on the plugs at each end). I now believe it to be a Mini SAS SFF-8087 36 pin to 4 SATA 7 pin hard drive forward breakout cables.
So I haven’t got a clue about SAS drives other than that you normally need a RAID controller board and a specific (workstation or server style) chipset mobo. And that in future, they are potentially a less costly source of proof of space (storage capacity). But I am only wanting to use the copper cables for this that may end up being CHIAFARM3. I managed to find a pinout for this standard on the internet and it looks like there is a straight through wire to wire (some shielded for their 12GHz bandwidth) end to end from the hard drive SATA III 7 pin data ports via the SSF-8087 adapters, and via the new cables (about £9 each on Amazon) to the PC standard microATX motherboard that I just bought for £12.50. Now… where is that sheet metal cutter?
Hi @enickma,
Please do me a favour. Can you let me know what your current totals are for these parameters from the Chia app screen (pool tab, I think)
| Date | 07-Oct-21 |
|---|---|
| Plots | 318 |
| Points | 561 |
| Since start | 13,281 |
| Last 24 hrs | 3,146 |
| Success | 100.03% |
| Chia to date | 0.18 |
| Space (TiB) | 31 |
| World space (EiB) | 35 |
| Estimated Time to Win (months) | 8 |
You are having way too much fun with this project! 
I am admittedly jealous. I wish I had such time to tinker! Thank you for telling me all about these adventures. Believe it or not, I really enjoy reading about it.
Sadly, I cannot provide any pool tab stats because I’m not in a pool, I just solo farm. All I have there is a “Join a Pool” button.
Hooray I have found someone else that likes the techie side. You have made my day. Thankyou.
I guess the stats above don’t mean anything to you - being a solo farmer. I am still unsure what they mean, except with your 4 Chia, you are 20X ahead of me. LOL.
AFAIK
Plots - How many plots you have
Points - Your share of the pie when your pool finds a block. I think points since start is how many points since you started the app, and last 24 hrs is pretty self-explanatory
Success - How many of your partials were valid
Chia to date - what you’ve earned
Space - How much disk space you’re dedicating to plots
World Space - Total Chia Net Space
Estimated time to Win - looks like it would be consistent with what mine is if you weren’t in a pool. I think it’s just a estimation of how long it would take all your plots to generate a win. Not 100% on that.
When you’re solo farming, you earn 2 XCH every time you find a block. All mine. The problem is, I NEVER know when that’s gonna happen. Every day I come down to my system and it says “4 XCH”. I have no idea when it will flip to 6. For me it’s kind of a fun little thing to check every day.
If I were in a pool instead, I could expect to get much more frequent (probably daily) small fractions of XCH as my pool earns them. I don’t like that because it’s such a trickle, and I’d never know that I could trust the pool operators to be honest. I do understand the benefits of pooling and why most people do it. Let’s stay in touch about how fast the XCH is accruing! You’re catching up w me quickly. I only have 535 plots, and I’m only adding like 6 per day right now.
Thanks for the explanations. They are consistent with my own interpretation. I have another 36 ready for this weekend, and have put that other plotter into production, so maybe adding another 72 next week.
I was meant to bring the 1,045 back online but have been distracted by some of that awful stuff called “work”. Meantime, I am more than satisfied that I have over-achieved the side-objective that was to come up to speed with computing in general, and Win10 PC configurations specifically. I have had enough exposure now to Android, Win10 and Linux to be dangerous if I want to and as for Mac - well that will remain an item that I have no interest whatsoever in, despite having used an Apple iPhone for the best part of a decade. 
I’ve got this sneaking suspicion that Win11 is when these “disparate operating systems” will all become much of a muchness, and that should be a good thing - right?
I think each of these mainstream operating systems has its place. If I were looking for a powerful gaming system it would likely be running Windows. Windows also owns most of the legacy on-prem server infrastructure at a lot of companies. I view Linux as a power tool. You need to do a specific thing, like run a container host, or some modern web app server, you’re probably using Linux. I’ve personally grown fond of Amazon Linux in AWS. I can use things like Cloud Formation Templates and user data scripting to make Linux dance for me. And finally Mac… All I can say is that I will never go back to using a Windows device for my day-to-day personal / general computing needs. I spent so many years hating on Macs, and then slowly started to notice that all the smart people I know use them. Finally took the dive switched to a MacBook Pro. I wish I would have made this switch years earlier. The Mac is to the PC as the iPhone is to Android. it’s just smoother, more polished, interacts with humans better, and it’s running on a Unix-ish kernel. To each their own of course, but if you haven’t given Mac a spin in a while I’d recommend it! 
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Hi, thanks for the heads up about Mac OS. My wife has a Macbook (or two). I may go play with it.
I feel I have achieved a milestone today although it is not one I wrote down. I have just gone over the one-millionth share of global Chia. The table below compares my TiB space to the global EiB space (PPM), and it is 1.036* 10^-6 - one millionth of the total.
| Date | 07-Oct-21 | 08-Oct-21 | 09-Oct-21 | 10-Oct-21 |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Plots | 318 | 318 | 318 | 363 |
| Points | 561 | 499 | 499 | 499 |
| Since start | 13,281 | 16,171 | 19,977 | - |
| Last 24 hrs | 3,146 | 3,386 | 3,349 | - |
| Success | 100.03% | 99.97% | 100.03% | 0.00% |
| Chia to date | 0.18 | 0.19 | 0.20 | 0.20 |
| Space (TiB) | 31.470 | 31.470 | 31.470 | 35.927 |
| World space (EiB) | 35.166 | 35.390 | 34.816 | 34.695 |
| PPM | 0.895 | 0.889 | 0.904 | 1.036 |
| ETW (months) | 8 | 8 | 8 | 7 |
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Added the 12th drive today to the production system. 425 plots farming with 0.271 chia farmed to date. ETW now six months. New target by end of 2021 is 1,800 plots farming.
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