Bad enough that I can't find a bloody 3080... this could make SSDs scarce too (if chia became wildly popular)!?!
Chia surpasses 1 exabyte of hard drive space
131–140 of 175 posts
Re: Chia surpasses 1 exabyte of hard drive space
#132Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sure but you need about 300GB RAM for the temporary files needed while creating plots.
Thinking about it, for someone who is looking to be seriously into chia, that might make sense. The cost of the RAM is only about $1,500. Might be a smart idea. Has anyone tried this? Would be interesting to see the benefits.
Actually plotting in parallel across multiple SSDs is likely to have the highest TiB/day of plots created. And then you’d be better off using the ram to enable more parallelism.
It’s a matrix of processor cores, threads per core, temp drive bandwidth, memory, and temp drive speed. Oh and cost per TiB of plots per day.
Also plotting happens in several stages, and each has a different set of requirements. So timing the running of plots in parallel and staggering starts also comes into it.
Re: Chia surpasses 1 exabyte of hard drive space
#133So .. is this like FileCoin, where people provide storage services and are rewarded, or is it a proof-of-waste scheme?
Filecoin has 4.6 EiB of space, of which only 11 PiB is actually used for file storage. It also has insane hardware and staking requirements. We are talking about $10k of hardware (including CPU and RAM) and staking $20k of the coin just to get started. With Chia anybody can get started with their spare hardware. Right now, it is a gold rush and this is leading to shortage of supply especially in China. This is a shor…
Has Filecoin not grown because of this?
Re: Chia surpasses 1 exabyte of hard drive space
#134Earlier quoted context omitted.
Filecoin has 4.6 EiB of space, of which only 11 PiB is actually used for file storage. It also has insane hardware and staking requirements. We are talking about $10k of hardware (including CPU and RAM) and staking $20k of the coin just to get started. With Chia anybody can get started with their spare hardware. Right now, it is a gold rush and this is leading to shortage of supply especially in China. This is a shor…
Has Filecoin not grown because of this?
because -> despite
Re: Chia surpasses 1 exabyte of hard drive space
#135Chia pre-mined 6 years worth of block rewards. Proof-of-space may be the closest thing we have to a viable proof-of-work replacement but this instantiation of it feels like a get rich quick scheme for its founders. Edit: My calculation was based on the initial reward schedule of 64 units per block, but when you take into account the fact that it ramps down to 4 units per block shortly thereafter, it's actually a prem…
Read the business whitepaper to see what they are doing with the pre-farm. https://www.chia.net/2021/02/10/chia-businesss-whitepaper.ht... You are free to agree or disagree with the plan, but need to read it before coming to any conclusions.
So the gist of the "strategic reserve" is that they will use pre-mined coins to bolster the company's value and enrich the shareholders.
Re: Chia surpasses 1 exabyte of hard drive space
#136Here I am thinking there's finally a working file storage coin for truly decentralized and anonymous file hosting and no... it's another proof-of-waste thing.
They have all this material saying how green it is, but it's a load of bullshit. Which isn't surprising when the early "farmers" have massive financial incentive to lie.
Yep, all it does is incentivise wasteful manufacturing of storage drives that are then used for nothing actually productive. The chia creators are lying snakes trying to get rich off another premined scamcoin with a bullshit hook to draw in the suckers.
Re: Chia surpasses 1 exabyte of hard drive space
#137Earlier quoted context omitted.
Wouldn't the ram be idling most of the time while farming? Only storage space matters for farming, speed doesn't.
Honestly, this part I don't understand. Somewhere over that couple days I read that you can farm on an HD, but plotting is faster on an SSD, so I'm making a huge presumption that plotting on a ramdisk would be even faster, without the wear on an SSD. I'm still not clear on Chia. Sometimes I think I understand it, and other times I'm not so sure...
Plotting is the initial process of building the files that you farm with. Plotting is very CPU/Memory/Disk IO intensive and the total writes to a disk to build a ~100gb plot is over 1tb with ~260gb of temporary space used at any one time during the process. This means that the process of building plots (plotting) is best done with an ssd. The fact that the process writes over 1tb to the disk to generate a ~100gb plot means that you will be really consuming the life of a consumer grade SSD with a low TBW rating. It is possible to use RAMDisk and yes it is potentially faster for a single plot. But you would need ~260gb of ram to plot 1 plot at a time. Nvme SSD's are only marginally slower than ramdisk but they are much cheaper per GB and you can connect multiples of them meaning you can build many plots at once. ie. 1-2 plots per CPU core concurrently provided you have sufficient ram ~3400mb per plot and sufficient fast temporary storage SSD. Once plotted the plot file can be moved to a spinning disk HDD and farmed from there as very little reads are ever made in the farming process. Can you use Ramdisk? yes. Is it better? No. It's far cheaper and faster to use SSDs and use your ram for building multiple concurrent plots.
Re: Chia surpasses 1 exabyte of hard drive space
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Re: Chia surpasses 1 exabyte of hard drive space
#139Earlier quoted context omitted.
Honestly, this part I don't understand. Somewhere over that couple days I read that you can farm on an HD, but plotting is faster on an SSD, so I'm making a huge presumption that plotting on a ramdisk would be even faster, without the wear on an SSD. I'm still not clear on Chia. Sometimes I think I understand it, and other times I'm not so sure...
Plotting is the initial process of building the files that you farm with. Plotting is very CPU/Memory/Disk IO intensive and the total writes to a disk to build a ~100gb plot is over 1tb with ~260gb of temporary space used at any one time during the process. This means that the process of building plots (plotting) is best done with an ssd. The fact that the process writes over 1tb to the disk to generate a ~100gb plot…
Thank you very much. That’s the first explanation that makes complete sense.
Re: Chia surpasses 1 exabyte of hard drive space
#140Earlier quoted context omitted.
To speculate, it seems like the lowest-cost supplier will win and that’s likely to be used drives from data centers. Chia farming uses storage, but not necessarily reliable storage so maybe any drives that start looking flaky could be rented out to Chia farmers, to get a bit more use out of them? At least some data centers destroy their old drives for privacy reasons, so they would need to figure out a way around tha…
If the data on the drive is encrypted, there’s no need to shred decommissioned drives.
True, but some companies are extra careful. Or were anyway, back when I got a tour.