@Evo said in 100TB Burst rig questions:
@Dtrade16, hi there. Kinda surprised your thread sat for so many days without some feedback. I started mining in February, and by April had a 50TB rig. From April to May I made around 50,000 coins. Between May and June, I've mined about 42,000 coins. That was with a larger rig (87.9 TB), but there was a big swelling in network capacity and the difficulty levels shot way up. Also, there is a certain randomness to Burst mining. Some days I'll make next to nothing, then the next day I might forge three blocks and get 600 to 900 coins in historical pool earnings as well. I don't have enough months under my belt to know how it varies strictly due to this randomness.
There are a lot of variables that go into mining, but here are my thoughts, for what they are worth. You can CPU mine and plot, but GPU mining and plotting should be quicker, and quicker is better. I have one machine with an RX-480 GPU and it is OK, but the other has a GTX-1060 and it works a lot better for me (although some say the NVIDIA cards can be difficult). But the 480 was a lot cheaper and still works well. My advice would be be to use a decent GPU, but one your budget can afford.
GPU plotting is fast enough that it outpaces the speed at which data can be written to a drive. You can actually have the plotter calculate for several drives at once and write to the drives in parallel.The GPU needs an allotment of RAM for each drive and more RAM for larger stagger sizes as well. For that reason I'd say get all the RAM you can, without getting silly. I have 16GB in my miner and am expanding my plotting rig from 10GB to 16GB or perhaps a bit more.
Yes, you can mix internal and external drives. I filled up my miner with five x 6TB SATA III, 7200 RPM internals. Everything else is external, all on USB 3.0 connections. USB 2.0 or less is too slow: don't use it!
The externals can cost less, so you can get more plotted space for less money. Mine are all Seagate 5Tb or 8TB externals, 5400 RPM, and are a kind of drive known as SMR (Shingled Magnetic Recording). This makes the drives cheaper, but VERY slow to plot. Mining speed is fine. I'm not independently wealthy, so cheap, slow plotting drives work for me. I actually plot to faster internal drives and then copy the finished plot files to the SMR drives. These long, continuous writes are much faster than the intermittent plotting writes when it comes to SMR drives.
Your miner will scan faster with optimized plots. You can plot normal plots and then optimize them or you can directly create optimized plots. I do the latter. I fill my drives as full as I can with plot files and I use multiple files per drive so that the plot files are between 2 to 3 TB each. There is no speed penalty for multiple files versus one large file. I've had the plotting software fail on larger plots, but never on files around 2TB.
A given USB controller only has so much bandwidth, and all of the drives plugged into it share that bandwidth. The mining software will access the drives in parallel, so things slow down as you add more and more drives. I've got too many on one card right now. When I had four externals, I was reading all my drives in about 15 seconds. With nine, it now takes 20 to 30 seconds. I'm plotting three more, so I'm sure it will just plain crawl with twelve drives.
The solution is to divide the drives up between multiple USB controllers. I'd like to see no more than four drives per controller. There are PCIEx1 cards that will give you one extra USB controller. There is at least one PCIEx4 card out there with four separate controllers. The key is having the right motherboard with the right expansion slots. Speaking of this, you can also get expansion cards that will give you extra SATA/SAS ports so you can add extra internal drives too. Of course you need enough drive bays and a PSU that can supply the needed power. And, again, you need the right motherboard expansion ports.
You can also use multiple PCs to mine; all of them looking at one wallet server running on one machine. I haven't done this yet, but it is my next step since my miner is pretty well out of expansion options. There are how-to's out there for implementing this.
That's it for me right now. I'm crazy tired. I'm afraid to even proof-read what I wrote. Sorry if it rambles on! I'm sure others can provide you more detailed information. The main thing is to dive in and get started. Everything can be upgraded down the road, but even a modest rig can get you earning some coins. Good luck! I'm off to bed...
Hello,
Thank you for your detailed and helpful reply. And yes, I didn't think anyone was going to post.
I have not done much research on the plotting side of things TBH, mostly been looking at hardware and what I would need to get started. I've got an old computer and a couple of drives just laying around, so I think I will start off with those and learn the whole mining process first before diving in further.
I just wanted to know what I needed in terms of hardware before I did more research. It seems like everyone is going with the external HDDs. What type of motherboard do you recommend? Like, what features should I be looking for? I know USB 3.0 is a must.
If I decide to go with internal HDDs, do you think it would be a good idea to pick up a server eventually? I think I can get a used one for a decent price. Also, for the internal set up, how many drives can I expand to?
I was researching these SATA controllers, is this the expansion card that you're referring to? What is the difference between a RAID controller and this expansion card? Are they the same thing? Sorry for the noobness.
In terms of expansion cards, suppose I got 3 16 port cards, which would allow me to hookup 48 drives, how would I attach all the drives onto the cards? It seems, even if I had the motherboard on a rack, the short sata cables would make it impossible to connect and layout 48 drives properly. Is there some sort of SATA extension cord I would have to purchase or something? Thanks again.