Chia (XCH) Discussion Thread

[BondiBlue]

Now that Chia has been launched I figured I'd make a discussion thread about it. Is anyone here farming Chia? Have any suggestions for those looking to get started with it? I'm interested to hear your thoughts. 

[dean_5234]

I can only imagine the agony new pc builders will experience if storage gets expensive too, imagine "placeholder hard drives" just like gpus lol

[dogwitch]

why how buggy the software is and zero support. it might not go far.

[BondiBlue]

8 hours ago, dogwitch said:

why how buggy the software is and zero support. it might not go far.

Is it that buggy? I haven't had any issues with it yet.

[2FA]

9 minutes ago, BondiBlue said:

Is it that buggy? I haven't had any issues with it yet.

The GUI is buggyish but the CLI has been relatively fine for me.

 

Sold 4 XCH yesterday so I'm happy. If you don't have the means to get up to around 100TB or more relatively quickly then you'll be heavily reliant on luck until pool support is finalized.

[BondiBlue]

1 minute ago, 2FA said:

The GUI is buggyish but the CLI has been relatively fine for me.

 

Sold 4 XCH yesterday so I'm happy. If you don't have the means to get up to around 100TB or more relatively quickly then you'll be heavily reliant on luck until pool support is finalized.

Yeah. I'm not doing this for any sort of profit, mostly just some fun. I've got loads of old drives I don't trust with my important data, so they're going to use for Chia plots. 

[dogwitch]

any time i plot. it takes days and when i exit after plot to 100% it will error out and not write to hdd.

multi Threadripper system having this issue.

[Mnky313]

19 hours ago, BondiBlue said:

Now that Chia has been launched I figured I'd make a discussion thread about it. Is anyone here farming Chia? Have any suggestions for those looking to get started with it? I'm interested to hear your thoughts. 

I decided to try farming with some HDDs I have lying around collecting dust but no matter what I tried I kept having constant problems, the Chia windows app would go completely white or crash randomly (which obviously isn't great when it has to run uninterrupted for hours at a time to plot).

Even with those issues I could sometimes get ~5-6 plots done a day (with my server and laptop plotting) but even at that rate (which wasn't stable because of the issues I mentioned with it crashing) the network size is growing way too fast for me to even stand a chance. it would take anywhere from a month or 2 to over a year to get a block reward for me (even if I had unlimited HDD space and just kept plotting).

I've stopped for now, maybe if I can get this literal pile of SAS hdds I got for dirt cheap a while ago up and running in a server I can start again as part of a pool but eh.

[Kilrah]

I've started plotting a couple of days ago since I have loads of unused storage and can have about 50TB worth of space I can let plots sit around on until I need it for something else.

I haven't really had issues with the app itself unless there was something else going wrong, but yeah once something else goes wrong it's toast. In my case it was USB dropping out while using an external SSD as temp drive, it will not recover and if you have another plotting operation running on another drive DO NOT cancel the failed one or the app will crash and also ruin the 2nd op, just let it unsuccessfully retry until the others are done. 

[Sequence211]

I am trying it out. Not too far yet. also only threw a couple of old external drives at it, and a couple intel SSDs as temp.

 

Have anyone seen a 'benchmark' for plotting chia? What matters the most? CPU cores/frequency, memory frequency, etc ?
Same about farming chia? or is it preferred to have high frequency for farming chia?

[McChicken6677]

I am 85 plots in. making 3 at once but i cant keep up. Ill have to find a pool for sure

[Kilrah]

Took me a while to get organised but now have 2 machines doing 2 simultaneous plots each (one not running during the night) so should be able to do around 15 per day...

[porina]

19 hours ago, Struck said:

Have anyone seen a 'benchmark' for plotting chia? What matters the most? CPU cores/frequency, memory frequency, etc ?
Same about farming chia? or is it preferred to have high frequency for farming chia?

Plotting seems to be a mix of CPU and disk performance. I can't afford to burn SSDs on plotting so I plot directly to HD, which is really slow. Like about 2 a day per HD. If you do as recommended and allow it to use an enterprise SSD (or don't care about destroying consumer ones) then you can try to figure out how much CPU you need per plot.

 

Farming I believe is just about leaving the disks running. CPU doesn't really matter at that point.

[Kilrah]

I have 2 machines plotting now, each with 1xNVMe and 1xSATA SSDs so 4 simultaneous plots.

Plotting doesn't seem to care much between SATA or NVMe as long as it's an SSD, difference seems about 5-10% at most between both.

The 9900K with 6 threads/8GB RAM per plot takes about 4h-4h30 per plot, the 7700K with 4 threads/6GB seems to take about 6h-6h30.

 

I did do one plot on an HDD for the lulz and it took 13h. Was done on the 7700K at the same time as the other 2 so might have affected the times those took, will check the time for the next ones now that experiment is finished. 

 

Since I'm spreading over 4 SSDs, 2 of which were unused in external cases I'm not too worried about wear, will check the counters regularly but even the oldest I have is still at 89%.

 

I have another SSD on the 9900K but it's only 240GB so too small, I'll see if I can combine it with a small virtual drive on another using storage spaces for the few minutes it needs to exceed 240 and run a 3rd parallel plot on that machine. 

 

Farming takes basically nothing, just everything idling. That's why I gave this a try, it'll just "be there" on a PC and storage that's already running and empty anyway.

[BondiBlue]

I've been plotting on my main machine for a few days very casually. I'm currently at 23 plots completed, so not too bad. I've got 3 SSDs in use for plotting (1x M.2 NVMe, 1x M.2 SATA, and 1x 2.5" SATA), and a bunch of random HDDs for farming. 

[Kilrah]

Got 30 plots now, and found another 13TB of space I can use... gonna take a while to fill this all up.

[RollinLower]

Finally finished my chia setup today!

1U supermicro is the plotting server, with the 4U JBOD for mass farming.

Got about 92 Plots farming so far, but that number is increasing rapidly. the supermicro box up top does 18 plots simultaneausly.

 

About 96TB in usable storage now, with only 7 bays populated! So definitely room for growth

 

[BondiBlue]

3 hours ago, RollinLower said:

Finally finished my chia setup today!

 

1U supermicro is the plotting server, with the 4U JBOD for mass farming.

Got about 92 Plots farming so far, but that number is increasing rapidly. the supermicro box up top does 18 plots simultaneausly.

 

About 96TB in usable storage now, with only 7 bays populated! So definitely room for growth

 

And here I am storing my plots on ~16TB of hard drives that aren't even mounted in bays in my case. Most of the drives were free, though. 

[RollinLower]

38 minutes ago, BondiBlue said:

Most of the drives were free, though. 

thats as close to a money printer as you can get these days. awesome!

[BondiBlue]

3 minutes ago, RollinLower said:

thats as close to a money printer as you can get these days. awesome!

Within the past month or so I've gotten roughly 7TB of free drives. I wouldn't trust them with my valuable data, but they're great for Chia. 

[Kilrah]

Got 50 plots now, and shuffled some hardware around so I can now do 7 simultaneous plots or about 25 a day.

 

The venerable 5960X is back in service in my main machine with its main 2TB NVMe, a 500GB SATA, and I found the 2nd 240GB Intel SSD that used to be a pair with the other back in 2014 so they're RAIDed again for a 3rd.

 

9900K will be back in the SFF case with its RAID of 2TB NVMes (so I do 2 plots on them) and the 500GB NVME in the PCIe slot, so 3 plots as well. 

 

7700K that was in the SFF case while I had stolen the 9900K as main machine for a while wil be back in its InWin Chopin just doing one on its main 1TB SATA.

 

There's the laptop that can do one but it's slow (8 hours vs 6) and noisy, so probably won't use it. 

[RollinLower]

anyone notice the massive pump today? XCH is back at 1300 bucks again!

[Hill160881]

My opinion of chia just went down the drain. 
 

I had 30 large plots and we had a power outage and now we can not reconnect the plots. Lost a month of plots. Also there is zero community help unless you are a software engineer. 
 

Be warned if you loose power ALL YOUR PLOTS ARE GONE! To be clear they are still there but you will not be able to sync them.  I am out. This is the biggest waste of time and money since you need to be able to write code and work in the command prompts to do this. 

[Hill160881]

Lol I just went and checked and all the new plots are now not available. That’s now 46 plots gone. What the hell!  This is a joke. No idea what’s wrong and no one to help. 

 

Hay if you are someone who understands how to use the command prompt and so forth this may not be hard. For me this is another language I don’t speak and I have a 60hour a week job.

 

Yep chia is not going to be something I can do even though I have 70tb of drive space. mainly because it has no interface. 
 

missing the buss again....

[RollinLower]

30 minutes ago, Hill160881 said:

Lol I just went and checked and all the new plots are now not available. That’s now 46 plots gone. What the hell!  This is a joke. No idea what’s wrong and no one to help. 

 

Hay if you are someone who understands how to use the command prompt and so forth this may not be hard. For me this is another language I don’t speak and I have a 60hour a week job.

 

Yep chia is not going to be something I can do even though I have 70tb of drive space. mainly because it has no interface. 
 

missing the buss again....

i mean, posting two random posts with just complaints isn't helping the situation.

i've had my system rebooted, power lost and just unplugged from the wall a couple times, and the only plots i lost where the ones that where still plottng. all my farming plots are intact.

seems like you just got unlucky somehow here man.