@haitch Thanks for the reply, I was thinking of buying a 5TB PMR drive like the Toshiba x300 and plotting to that then moving it over to the SMR drives.
you could buy that model there are many. The 4 port models usually link 2 ports together; making 2 hubs 4 ports. Many motherboards do too. You will know when you reach a bottleneck when your miner read time gets beyond say 40 seconds. If it goes over 60 seconds per round you will loose submissions.
The PC you've mentioned the one with an i7 processor should make plots nice and fast with xplotter; any pc capable to read your plot capacity is good to go for mining.
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