Does the speed of the reading and writing of a Hard drive cap the speed/time of writing plots?



  • I've read somewhere that one can use an SSD to write plots then move them to the large HDDs that one will use for mining. Doing this will allow one to write plots even x4 faster. So I'm wondering what if I bought an NVME SSD with a read/write speed of 2100mb+/s, would this be even x10 to x20 faster in writing plots?

    PS:- This is inclusive of having a good/great CPU/GPU.



  • you'll waste write cycles on the ssd, causing it to die faster.



  • I'm not worried about it dying as long as it gets the job done. The only aim of that SSD would be serve it's master(me) to achieve his ultimate goal(write plots waaay faster saving a ton of time) to it's last days.


  • admin

    @kn9ts Yes, you can improve your plotting times ... but i suggest you first check how many nonces/min you can calculate with your environment ... for e.g. xplotter or gpuPlotter ... you can test plotting to a normal disk ... before anything get written, it will be created in memory ... so you will get accurate numbers before the plotters start writing. Will be quite hard to reach nonces/min values that come even close to 2100mb/s. Also you have to copy over the data to normal disks later, what makes the idea not working. As at this point, you are again limited to write speed of normal drives until you can plot again to that ssd. As long as you do not have e.g. 11 of that ssd (ssd 10 times faster than normal hdd) to buffer all the data ... 10 copy over and one for plotting, you will have no big benefit in the end. Or did i miss something?!



  • @luxe Thanks Luxe for the comprehensive breakdown. All I am worried or would like to do it this was, 1 SSD to plot and X number of HDD where I move the plot files too. Yes I would have to copy over the plots to the mining HDDs. Using USB 3.0 should be fast enough to move the plot file into the HDDs. But if I am able to save some time through this, hopefully days then that would be the benefit I'm buying. After all the most precious commodity we have as humans is TIME.


  • admin

    @kn9ts If your usb drives are SMR you will save time for sure ... if they are PMR i do not see a benefit.



  • @kn9ts said in Does the speed of the reading and writing of a Hard drive cap the speed/time of writing plots?:

    So I'm wondering what if I bought an NVMe SSD with a read/write speed of 2100mb+/s, would this be even x10 to x20 faster in writing plots?

    The Intel 750 SSD DiCs max out at 1.2Tb capacity. They are very (very) fast, and designed for demanding commercial applications, so quite robust (with a long Warrantee) However, each one costs about the same as two good 10Tb drives. And they take up PCIe slots /lanes (even with the U.2 variant, or M.2 adaptor).

    But Luxe is right, the bottle-neck is then transferring Plots to the HDDs, with multiple cycles per drive. If the farm were big enough, then it might be worth setting up a couple of Raids, with 3x 4Tb SSD in each set (for example). But that ain't cheap either.


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