32x SATA port on a single motherboard

[Moonzy]

Summary

Chia coin is a coin that can be mined on storage.

It has gained popularity recently, causing storage drive prices to surge in Asia

 

Onda released Onda B365 D32-D4 Magic Edition motherboard that supports up to 32 SATA drives for Chia mining.

 

Quotes

Quote

...packing 32 x SATA ports that are ready for 32 x SATA-based HDDs or SSDs making it totally perfect to mine Chia. As for the motherboard, it is based on the Intel B365 chipset with 4 x DDR4 DIMMs and a single PCIe 3.0 x16 and PCIe 3.0 x1 slot.

You can have up to 448TB of storage on the Onda B365 D32-D4 Magic Edition motherboard, where depending on your budget -- and what drives you can actually find -- can use either HDDs, SSDs or SSDs on the NVMe standard.

 

My thoughts

This is like those boards with many PCIE slots, but SATA, basically

While this board is meant for mining, I wonder if it's better than conventional storage solutions in some ways, or perhaps it'll be an interesting alternative?

In other news, storage shortage may be next, so if you were contemplating on buying a drive, maybe now is the time.

 

Sources

https://www.tweaktown.com/news/78958/this-is-the-ultimate-32-ssd-crypto-mining-motherboard-for-chia-coin/index.html

[WereCatf]

I have no intention of participating in this newest fad, but I am curious: do you want lots of speed or lots of storage-space for Chia? Or both?

[jaslion]

Just now, WereCatf said:

I have no intention of participating in this newest fad, but I am curious: do you want lots of speed or lots of storage-space for Chia? Or both?

As far as I understand it's about taking up storage space and periodically being checked if it's still occupied. So yeah enjoy not being able to buy harddrives.

[WereCatf]

1 minute ago, jaslion said:

So yeah enjoy not being able to buy harddrives.

Most people will want SSDs anyways.

[WhitetailAni]

Will SSDs be impacted, or is it storage capacity over speed? If speed, scratch me getting a GTX 690 - I'm nabbing a Crucial MX500 500GB now before it's crazy expensive.

[jaslion]

1 minute ago, WereCatf said:

Most people will want SSDs anyways.

Indeed but this will backfire into other industries too not only consumers. So lets hope for some bans on crypto once more companies start feeling an impact.

[Moonzy]

4 minutes ago, WereCatf said:

I have no intention of participating in this newest fad, but I am curious: do you want lots of speed or lots of storage-space for Chia? Or both?

 

Just now, FakeKGB said:

Will SSDs be impacted, or is it storage capacity over speed? If speed, scratch me getting a GTX 690 - I'm nabbing a Crucial MX500 500GB now before it's crazy expensive.

I'm reading something about doing calculations on nvme and then transferring it to HDD for storage

 

But I'm not sure how reliable that info is, I haven't looked into chia mining as I'm uninterested, for now

But I might look into it to see if it makes sense to do it to offset the costs of my recently acquired HDDs

[Kisai]

25 minutes ago, Moonzy said:

Summary

Chia coin is a coin that can be mined on storage.

It has gained popularity recently, causing storage drive prices to surge in Asia

 

Onda released Onda B365 D32-D4 Magic Edition motherboard that supports up to 32 SATA drives for Chia mining.

 

Quotes

 

My thoughts

This is like those boards with many PCIE slots, but SATA, basically

While this board is meant for mining, I wonder if it's better than conventional storage solutions in some ways, or perhaps it'll be an interesting alternative?

In other news, storage shortage may be next, so if you were contemplating on buying a drive, maybe now is the time.

 

Sources

https://www.tweaktown.com/news/78958/this-is-the-ultimate-32-ssd-crypto-mining-motherboard-for-chia-coin/index.html

This is not really a novel design, it's basically a server drive backplane without the server chassis. Most small 1U/2U servers are all NVMe now. 

 

That said, if you could get a chassis for it, it would make an interesting alternative NAS.

 

 

[DildorTheDecent]

>Surrendering hard drive space for the elites to hide their CP.

 

No thanks.

[RejZoR]

Because having GPU shortages is not bad enough, lets hoard HDD's too. This whole mining is literal cancer for the entire computer industry.

 

It's especially annoying because with gaming, it's pretty predictable and companies churn out just the right capacities of products. With mining, today they can sell in millions of units and literally over night, whole thing can become worthless and they wouldn't sell a single unit. So no one goes all out to satisfy the demand.

 

It's also hilarious from ecological standpoint. Everyone bitching to us about cars and appliances to be as efficient as possible yet mining, one of the most inefficinet things known to mankind, the stupid mining, no one bothers with or regulates. And saying it's the same as if it was used for gaming, it's not. What gamer runs anything 24/7 ? Even most gamery gamers would spend what, 8 hours a day max? It's just not comparable in consumption.

[NunoLava1998]

Honestly I think chia mining is just a fad.. it probably won't cause HDD/SSD shortages.

Atleast it uses less electricity than GPU mining though.

[pas008]

5 minutes ago, RejZoR said:

Because having GPU shortages is not bad enough, lets hoard HDD's too. This whole mining is literal cancer for the entire computer industry.

 

It's especially annoying because with gaming, it's pretty predictable and companies churn out just the right capacities of products. With mining, today they can sell in millions of units and literally over night, whole thing can become worthless and they wouldn't sell a single unit. So no one goes all out to satisfy the demand.

 

It's also hilarious from ecological standpoint. Everyone bitching to us about cars and appliances to be as efficient as possible yet mining, one of the most inefficinet things known to mankind, the stupid mining, no one bothers with or regulates. And saying it's the same as if it was used for gaming, it's not. What gamer runs anything 24/7 ? Even most gamery gamers would spend what, 8 hours a day max? It's just not comparable in consumption.

 

crypto seems to pay off more than gaming

and how is it waste if you are getting value from it risk or not

how is it cancer seriously if companies are getting their sales

I hate the fact i cant get new gpu also but its their right also to do what they want with their purchased products

 

 

[Moonzy]

1 minute ago, James Evens said:

Some where else the news sad it was somewhere around $500.

Makes me wonder, what does an equivalent storage server cost?

Board + backplane, I suppose it should be cheaper or else this wouldn't have to exist

[DildorTheDecent]

2 minutes ago, NunoLava1998 said:

Honestly I think chia mining is just a fad.. it probably won't cause HDD/SSD shortages.

There's a chance Chia might take off in ways that Burstcoin never really did.

 

Especially of there's vendors making boards like this for it.

[StDragon]

Look on the bright side: at least there will be less storage capacity for surveillance that "Big Brother" craves. 

[X-System]

This motherboard is useless...

 

A Threadripper motherboard with x8/x16 PCIe slots is enough. You put up to 7x MegaRAID SAS 9365-28i controller cards.

 

Each controller card can to have up to 28 SATA drives. With 7 cards, you can to have up to 196 SATA drives

[StDragon]

9 minutes ago, gabrielcarvfer said:

Hmm, storage mining reminds me of Space Monkey P2P "cloud" storage. You would buy a NAS and half of the storage was used to replicate other people content, backing up your stuff in case your drive failed. Not sure what happened with them.

Liability. What if a honey pot traced a fragment of illicit content (CP) to your NAS without you knowing it? You being unaware wouldn't necessarily absolve you from being an accessory to a crime.

[bcredeur97]

wait till they come up with something that rewards miners for storage speed. Goodbye SSD's 

(and RAM if a RAMdisk is able to do it)

[Icarus_Radio]

CHIA exploded on Chinese Internet half a month ago and HDD's price are getting back to normal right now, so there is no need to worry about it.

 

Basically, CHIA mining is to store a lot of lottery tickets on your hard disk. The ideal case is go all SSD, but that would blow the budget. A more realistic approach is to use a high endurance SSD to cache and large HDD to store. Consumer-level SSDs are not high-endurance enough (except for Samsung 860 PRO and 970 PRO, even though they are considered low-level drives).

 

Another fact is that current power (similar to hashrate for eth, just to indicate the size of all drives in the network) is around 800 PB, and manufacturers produce several hundred EB drives per year, I don't think there is too much to worry about unless you wish to buy 8+ TB drives. Just look out for enterprise-level SSDs on second-hand market, as they might have just retired from mining and have very low endurance.

[da na]

Wonder what the future of servers/NAS on a medium scale (meaning not home but also not huge servers) will be with boards like these out there. It's amazing how much mining has pushed tech development forward. The first mining surge sparked development of smaller fabrication nodes pushing the nm down, now we get boards with 32 SATA ports...

[da na]

Oh and also, that looks like a very proprietary form factor. And are those two 6 pin CPU power connector? I think that's supposed to go in a special case since it provides SATA data AND power...

[manikyath]

sounds like a super good idea to put the weight of 32 hard drives supported by nothing but fragile sata connectors on a bigger than normal motherboard.

[manikyath]

Just now, James Evens said:

One downside is the dimension/layout: W310xL510mm. With a short rack you could turn it 90° fixing the drive orientation but now the IO is on the side.

i'd be amazed if any mining operation uses any sort of standard 'server' rack if office shelving can be had much cheaper if bought in bulk, and can be basicly any size you want.

[DeScruff]

2 hours ago, wat3rmelon_man2 said:

It's amazing how much mining has pushed tech development forward. The first mining surge sparked development of smaller fabrication nodes pushing the nm down, now we get boards with 32 SATA ports...

Ummm...Did it though? Last I checked manufacturers have been pushing nm down regardless... Its been pretty consistent the nm node has halved every ~4 years, with generally an in between bump down every 2 years. (I might be off on 2006/2004, thats before my time and pre Kepler, an architecture could be made on multiple nodes.)

2020: Ampere 7/8 nm

2018: Turing 12nm
2016: Pascal 16/14 nm
2014: Maxwell 28 nm (but a power improvement)
2012: Kepler 28 nm
2010: Fermi 40 nm
2008: Tesla 2.0 65/55 nm
2006: Tesla 1.0 90 nm
2004: Curie 130/110 nm

[StDragon]

4 hours ago, wat3rmelon_man2 said:

It's amazing how much mining has pushed tech development forward.

It doesn't though. If anything, it hurts the industry because of how unstable the crypo market is. One year, it's on fire, another, it crashes as quickly as it comes. It's not the initial sales that hurts, it's the crash with used hardware flooding the market as miners seek an exit to liquidate their hardware. This especially hit Nvidia badly. The cycles of feast and famine are never good. Steady markets are more preferred.