Chia HDD Mining Project

April 23rd, 2021, 08:26 PM

Hey guys!

Hard Drive mining, the next big thing??

Perhaps! Chia coin is the new kid on the crypto coin mining block. Instead of using GPUs to mine it uses Hard Drives. Instead of Proof of Stake they use Proof of Space and Time.

Read more here: https://www.chia.net
FAQ here: https://www.chia.net/faq

Decided to take a risk here and get in on the ground floor. As I mentioned here ( Building a Crypto Mining Rig) I ordered a computer last night plus three 14 TB hard drives. The computer will be here on May 1st. I should be up and running on May 2nd.

Risk here is minimal; My wife needs a new computer and I want to build a NAS device. I would have bought all of this stuff anyways. Plus as I mentioned in my post I will be using the vid card as part of my ETH mining rig. At the end of the day its a wash. At best I will be on the ground floor of something big!

On to the build:

You can use various operating systems to mine. I will be using Windows out of the gate since Window comes on the computer. However, you can use any of the following even Raspberry Pi!

The process involves two steps; first build a plot and then farm it. Apparently it takes some time to build a plot. They recommended using two SSDs to build the plot then move it to a a slower storage hard drive.

In order to build the plots quickly you need to have a multithread CPU. They recommend at least a 8 thread CPU. With multiple threads you can build one plot at a time or use multiple threads and build them in parallel .

Video cards - just need something cheap.

Storage: 2 SSD's to build the plots. Then use large Enterprise grade HDD for storage. For this build I went with three Seagate 14TB Exos X16 7200 rpm 12 Gb/s SAS 3.5" Internal HDD. I found them on sale.

In order to make this scalable beyond 5 drives a external hd enclosure will probably be needed.

Memory: building the plot is memory intensive. At a minimum, 16GB is needed for this process.

Mining pools:
Currently there are no pools. So you have mine a entire Block. Currently Chia is not the on any exchanges however, that will change in the near future.

Below is a couple you tube videos to give background and how to get setup. I will detail the full setup once I get my computer.

Robert

May 4th, 2021, 11:21 AM

Investing in alternative cryptocurrency �alt-coins� is just about the worst investment someone can make IMHO.
(NOT picking on Chia specifically here) however, from a trader�s perspective, if you go to any cryptocurrency exchange and look at the price of the coin when it is released onto the market, they drop like a rock almost every single time.
Why?
Because the exchanges sell a large percentage of their holdings that they have accumulated.
Exchanges get a sweetheart deal to bring these coins to market.
Essentially pay for play.
There is also the factor of desperate miners who want to get maximum dollar as early as possible (another reason for it to drop like a rock).
The behavior of cryptocurrency is essentially that of a bond for anyone mining any cryptocurrency so why waste the money when trading is a much better ROI.
If the same money a cryptocurrency miner spent on mining hardware was spent on purchasing the coin at the exchange they would do FAR better in the long run because then they are not subject to the whims of the exchanges who are not regulated like the US exchanges.
Even bitcoin which is trading on multiple US exchanges is not a good investment because there is not a ratio multiple at clearing like other commodities.
Look at the minimum ratios for any commodity at clearing and you will see it is certainly not one to one, so even the CME has fools making cryptocurrency decisions within.
The big players can put a small percentage of their coin into a US exchange, watch the price rise to where they want it, then pull out a large portion to watch the price drop.
No sweat off their back because of course they hold essentially the same amount of cryptocurrency whether on the block chain or within the exchange.
No wonder the CME can never make accurate predictions on the percentages of the price fluctuations. LOL

Interested in Cryptocurrency investing?
Be patient.
Mimic the behavior of the big players.
Wait for a big bitcoin price drop.
Look at the relative price action.
All of these alternative coins drop faster (and do not recover as quickly) as bitcoin does.
Bitcoin gobbles up the alt coins over time based on this market behavior so why take on unnecessary risk?

November 22nd, 2021, 07:56 PM

Is that disk space actually used for anything useful like data storage (not the blockchain)?

Chia HDD Mining Project

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Chia HDD Mining Project