Chia Mining

[Human1235234]

How viable is chia mining with a budget of $500? If viable, would be the best build for it?

[Electronics Wizardy]

Not very profitable at that cost. Probably could only get like 20tb on the market with a good deal with 2 external hdds. BUt the market is growing very fast, and since there are no pools now, there is a good chance you will get nothing.

[Human1235234]

5 minutes ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

Not very profitable at that cost. Probably could only get like 20tb on the market with a good deal with 2 external hdds. BUt the market is growing very fast, and since there are no pools now, there is a good chance you will get nothing.

Thanks.

 

 

What would be the minimum cost for something profitable?

[Electronics Wizardy]

Just now, Human1235234 said:

Thanks.

 

 

What would be the minimum cost for something profitable?

Your probably not making profit these days. The total size is growing fast, and hdd prices are going up. Your a bit late for this if you want to make a quick profit.

[Chris Pratt]

der8aurer recently tested Chia mining, to see if it will really kill an SSD, but ended up more covering how absolutely pointless it is. Each plot is just a chance to win a reward, and with the sheer number of people that jumped on the bandwagon, it would take years to win anything, without many, many plots. Those plots take time to create, which is dependent on the drive speed, obviously (fast SSDs or go home), but also surprisingly use up a lot of CPU and RAM resources as well. While, you can technically plot on the most basic potato of a computer, the time to create the number plots you'd need to even have a chance of winning any rewards at all, pretty much necessitates a very beefy rig.

 

To even bring your odds down to a few months (and remember this is a moving target... the more plots being created overall the more you need to create to keep up), you'd need at least 10TB of plots, which for SSD storage gets real expensive quick.

 

And then there's that pesky SSD failure issue. You can't just buy crappy SSDs. You need high quality drives with TBWs north of 1000. Wth a pedestrian TBW of 150 or so, you'll be replacing drives every month.

 

Long and short, Chia mining is just not very profitable. You'd honestly probably do better long term paying even scalped prices for a 30 series card, and doing Ethereum mining on that.

 

 

[Human1235234]

25 minutes ago, Chris Pratt said:

der8aurer recently tested Chia mining, to see if it will really kill an SSD, but ended up more covering how absolutely pointless it is. Each plot is just a chance to win a reward, and with the sheer number of people that jumped on the bandwagon, it would take years to win anything, without many, many plots. Those plots take time to create, which is dependent on the drive speed, obviously (fast SSDs or go home), but also surprisingly use up a lot of CPU and RAM resources as well. While, you can technically plot on the most basic potato of a computer, the time to create the number plots you'd need to even have a chance of winning any rewards at all, pretty much necessitates a very beefy rig.

 

To even bring your odds down to a few months (and remember this is a moving target... the more plots being created overall the more you need to create to keep up), you'd need at least 10TB of plots, which for SSD storage gets real expensive quick.

 

And then there's that pesky SSD failure issue. You can't just buy crappy SSDs. You need high quality drives with TBWs north of 1000. Wth a pedestrian TBW of 150 or so, you'll be replacing drives every month.

 

Long and short, Chia mining is just not very profitable. You'd honestly probably do better long term paying even scalped prices for a 30 series card, and doing Ethereum mining on that.

Thank you.

[Human1235234]

1 hour ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

Your probably not making profit these days. The total size is growing fast, and hdd prices are going up. Your a bit late for this if you want to make a quick profit.

Alright, thanks you for the help.

[Psittac]

On 5/21/2021 at 1:15 PM, Chris Pratt said:

der8aurer recently tested Chia mining, to see if it will really kill an SSD, but ended up more covering how absolutely pointless it is. Each plot is just a chance to win a reward, and with the sheer number of people that jumped on the bandwagon, it would take years to win anything, without many, many plots. Those plots take time to create, which is dependent on the drive speed, obviously (fast SSDs or go home), but also surprisingly use up a lot of CPU and RAM resources as well. While, you can technically plot on the most basic potato of a computer, the time to create the number plots you'd need to even have a chance of winning any rewards at all, pretty much necessitates a very beefy rig.

 

To even bring your odds down to a few months (and remember this is a moving target... the more plots being created overall the more you need to create to keep up), you'd need at least 10TB of plots, which for SSD storage gets real expensive quick.

 

And then there's that pesky SSD failure issue. You can't just buy crappy SSDs. You need high quality drives with TBWs north of 1000. Wth a pedestrian TBW of 150 or so, you'll be replacing drives every month.

 

Long and short, Chia mining is just not very profitable. You'd honestly probably do better long term paying even scalped prices for a 30 series card, and doing Ethereum mining on that.

 

 

I'm just now looking into chia but I think you've missed a crucial point in the process.  Plotting is done on a fast ssd and storing is done on hdd's.  The plotting is cpu intensive but the storage is done on minimal specs.  I honestly know little about this subject and am trying to learn more, but that much I have figured out.  It is indeed a moving target but cpu + ram + fast ssd + high capacity warm storage seams to be what it's all about.  Luckily enough in my tech hording nature I have a handful of gaming PC's and servers just laying around, each gaming PC is cranking on it's gpu but I have all of the cpu and storage going unused.  My plan is to "retire" my main machine, have it crank on a gpu and put the cpu and ram into work on a 2tb nvme that I'm going to buy tomorrow, then fire up my two dell server's and let it offload to them.  Sadly enough I will be dailying on my laptop with a 1060 but to be honest, of everything day to day it will run everything I do with a slight hit in perceived speed.  I don't play AAA games these days only free to play, so my obsession with tech will hopefully pay for it's self in hind sight.