One of the selling points, was the initial generation takes work, but the passive background work is supposed to “save” energy rather than bit/alt-coin constant Mining, for either initial reward or nothing (the old way).
They seemed to try to promote the lower energy cost to it.
Not sure how low an energy footprint of 319 PiB is though. (largest size as of now) but got to be less power than a couple thousand GPU’s
Yeah, 319PB that needs to be powered on continually for 10 years? Or can you power it up every once and a while to see if you got coin? Having trouble wrapping my head around it.
I am trying to find information about this. But I think, if i read it correctly, your plot is randomly selected by the system and then you have to reply to puzzle within a certain time. Basically, yeah I think.
I am not sure. I got the impression it was always on.
That bit was not such a concern I’m afraid
It true that the software is extremely buggy still. I am thinking I will have just the harvester running once I fill up all my empty space with plots. And then probably gonna firewall off the PC from the rest of my network with exception of NFS or samba connections.
Small update.
I got a new motherboard + CPU in my main PC, so I had spare parts to make this motherboard and CPU another dedicated rig for wasting my time and money mining for CHIA. This PC is just a 500W PSU, Ryzen 7 1700, 16GB DDR4, a very old and trash Nvidia card, and a Pcie RAID card. I don’t have a spare case that I can use at the moment, so its just gonna have to sit on the new motherboard’s box for now.
When I bought the PSU awile back from Ebay (used), it didn’t ship with any cables, so I need to use SATA power from the main PC because the only attached cables included are 24-pin and 8-pin. I have some PSU cables in my Amazon cart but I keep forgetting to buy them lmao.
I got this Pcie RAID card, and 4 cheap 256GB nvme’s; They are running in RAID 0. The Pcie card was weird to install, for some reason I couldn’t get the drivers installed on Debian, Arch, or Windows, but they worked flawlessly on the first try after I got a Ubuntu install going.
This current setup plots very fast compared to the other 2, I should be on track to fill up all my storage soon - maybe someday I can have just one single CHIA. 
I decided to just do this in the background.
I have my ASRock X300 Desk Mini with the upgraded Noctua NH-L9a-AM4 cooler and a Ryzen 5 Pro 4650. It sits on my desk on all day and night so why not put it to work. Super low power draw, I’m not going to get a ton of plots, but I get about 6 plots a day. Take a while to fill the extra 4 3TB drives I have. If I decide to keep plowing plots, I may migrate the plots to a NAS with extra space. We will see. This is more of an experiment, not for major gain with extra hardware I had on hand. I had tried tons of cores and lots of ram with a single plot (IE 12 cores, 28GB ram), but didnt see much of an increase in productivity. I’m settling with 3 concurrent plots with a 10 min wait in between iterations. I use 3 threads for each (out of 12 threads on my CPU-leaving 3 spare) and 8GB of ram for each (Out of 32GB total so 8 spare for web surfing etc).
Will post again if something comes up that’s worth while…
I’m beginning to think that crypto has only ever been a conspiracy to drive up electronics prices and produce ewaste en-masse while getting a few randos and a lot of wallstreet brokers filthy rich in the process.
Was thinking about dedicating ~16Tib to this, but it sounds like it’s pretty much just for massive storage servers at this point. A way for the rich to get richer, I guess.
I’d recommend putting a fan on those HDDs, though. It’ll make them last longer.
The holder has fans built in 
they aren’t doing any work besides holding the plots. All the work is being done inside the pc on the cheap nvme I got. And it has a copper heatsink.
So how many ssds have people destroyed so far?
None so far… still holding at 100%.
8TB of plots is something like 160~ TBW iirc?
I remember looking it up, but basically, consumer drives are basically just going to be completely burned out by this fad. On the bright side, the industry will make a batch of high endurance consumer facing drives that are basically server-grade and release them into the market, expecting them to be gobbled up by crypto farming anyway, so we might wind up in a situation a couple years from now where used enterprise-grade consumer-oriented SSDs are floating around and fairly affordable.
With 98% of their usefulness gone, sure.
Maybe not. If chia crashes, people will want to sell off what hardware they still have that’s usable.
If it’s sold on ebay, and has 98% of it’s write endurance burned through, you can pretty easily say that it’s selling expired goods, and get a refund, if not through ebay/the seller, then through your CC/paypal or whatever.
50% of a petabyte is still five hundred terabytes of useful life, in a high capacity drive that likely has pretty even wear leveling. If 2~4PBW drives catch on for chia miners, it could, potentially, make a nice used market.
That is really the shitty part about chia, and crypto in general, though; it’s wearing out hardware with a finite usable life, for no reason other than, I’m guessing, a way of verifying investment, so people can’t spin up a few hundred VMs and pretend to be contributing a few hundred computers to the block chain.
I wonder if there’s some hardware identifiable digital marker that can’t be spoofed in a virtual box somehow that could be used instead?
Heck, maybe 3D Xpoint will take off in the consumer space from it and more optane/whatever drives will be made. Or, RAMdisks increasing memory prices temporarily and then causing a DDR4 selloff crash that makes it easy to grab another 64gb for a hundo.
Trick question what will have more endurance left, chia tlc or brand new 16 level and cells lololol
Endurance keeps going down
Thinking about it a bit, this type of crypto should probably actually be illegal. It’s essentially like paying people mass-produced but also completely unique arcade tokens to burn processed wood. Like if a totally unique barcode was etched into plastic arcade tokens, and doled out to people who could prove they burned X kg of processed lumber, with increasingly lower payouts for increasingly high amounts of increasingly scarce lumber.
It’s obfuscated just enough for people to think it’s okay, but it’s actually legitimately an indefensible plot to produce ewaste and consume resources in order to produce scarcity and drive up ASPs and make a few people stupid rich in the process.
Tbf, a lot of people don’t need the endurance that many TLC or even qlc ssds provide.
Nah unfortunately.they will make those high endurance drives and market them as mining drive and charge 4x the mining price of regular consumer drives which last I saw was $1000 for 12TB… So yeah. 4G a drive regardless of what it can do they can fuck off. Consumers will never benefit from this, it is just another artificial boost of price, waste of energy and massive e-waste, that some how environmentalists have not yet cottoned on to. I will be so very happy when they find out crypto is a thing and make it untouchable by all but the most illegal of things so the rest of us can get back to actually buying PC parts at a not fucked price.
You all mining… You suck.
This.
Yeah, endurance going down, allowing for less expensive drives, because people really don’t need that much.
Chia is the exception rather than the rule, because not normal domestic use pattern.
Maybe so for most users, but for some of us, it’s expected that computer hardware will last it’s service time by specification rather than by usable life.
Also, QLC is actually a lot worse than people realize. For any kind of heavy workload, I would never recommend QLC or even budget TLC. Stuff like a recording cache for shadowplay, or a drive to fill up with regularly played games and then use the last bit of available storage to swap out whatever new fad comes out; that’s not even really enthusiast level workloads, but QLC drives will fail rather early under that kind of use case, especially for the uneducated gamer buying a 2TB drive for their OS and all of the games.
More affordable MLC(measured on the order of petabytes written for yesteryear’s consumer 3D MLC) would be great.
Also, manufacturers know this and use it to justify stagnant flash prices with cheaper, but quicker to fail flash. MLC to TLC should have seen a 33%/50% price difference to be in line with cost per bit, assuming TLC is no harder to produce than MLC(which is not the case), but was instead a 50%/100% price difference. Same with TLC to QLC, it’s seeing a 25%/33% when it should be a 20%/25%.
Heck, I think SLC to MLC was something like a 90%/1000% difference? A factor of ten, because even though it was only twice as many bits per cell/at best a 50% cost per bit, the write endurance shift was one tenth, and the product was priced as such.
Flash manufacturers are counting on faster-to-fail products to keep that recurrent user spending. They are evidently disappointed that those 3D TLC drives aren’t failing faster.
Also, for the sake of this point, I have a 500gb planar TLC drive with a 150TBW rating, that probably has about 12TBW on it? I’ve had apparently 2774 cases of bitrot that were caught by the drive and fixed, and I’ve absolutely lost data on this drive in more recent months, and it was definitely to bitrot.
Planar TLC has higher write endurance than 3D QLC. This drive has been babied for about 5 years as only an OS drive with the occasional game and accidental GB or two of recording.
QLC is for hot WORM storage, tbqh. I wouldn’t even use it as a limmux boot drive, but I’m confident my 128gb planar MLC drive is as rock solid as ever. Never lost a bit on it afaik, though it’s always possible I’m wrong. Certainly it hasn’t shown up. It’s also a much smaller, harder to wear-level drive with an older, less robust controller that’s seen a more abusive work life.
edit: just checked, and my old 128gb still hasn’t reported any known read error that I’ve had in the fs or smart data. The only time it’s ever had any issues with data is from known bad software that has a tendency to do that(gameguard), and even then, I don’t actually remember a single case of it, likely because it was too small to ever put PSO2 onto anyway, and gameguard tends to focus on destroying the drive the software it’s working on is on rather than the root drive.(thankfully)
oh BWOY does gameguard like to destroy whatever PSO2 is installed onto though. I bet the 3TiB spinning rust already has ures because of it.
edit2: 3D QLC will likely retain data better before it hits the critical failure point and needs to retire cells, though. Planar TLC had a lot of issues with cold storage, which are likely the cause of early bitrot on this drive. It’s only really been offline for maybe a week or two at the worst of times, though. But, QLC just isn’t good, and PLC will be even worse. Probably under 100 PE cycles?
