Plotting Very Slow - 5TB Seagate Drive
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Good to know, just saw a video on this today actually.
No wonder my first drive took so long to plot xD will definitely be looking into alternatives.
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plotting to a seagate wont work something is wrong with their design for this application. but you can plot to other drives and then copy over to the seagate. it reads fine it just can't be plotted on
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Well I am currently mining on a 5tb seagate. So it does actually work, it's just not quite as efficient...
And yes, the plots were written directly to the drive.
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i am mining on seagate too and it works just fine, but i didnt want to wait 10 day to plot on it, so i plotted to my pc and then coped the plot to the seagate. only way to make it work unless, like i said, you want to plot at 10% the normal speed
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@PeterSkrzyniarz It's not the design of the application. It's the Write speed of the Seagate drive.
Seagates are extremely cheap. This is because the drive is SMR.
SMR is quite bad AFAIK. The Read speed is incredible (165~200 MB/s). The Write speed is hell (5~25 MB/s). Which is why plotting takes forever. But when mining, it has to Read the plot files. So mining will be smooth.Plotting will be hell-like.
Mining will be great.I suggest just plotting on another HDD that is not SMR and put the plot file on the SMR drive.
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Write speed only sucks on SMR drives if you are doing random writes due to how the data is shingled on top of other data. Large sequential writes are not a problem and you can get well over 100 MB/s with disk write caching on. When creating an optimized plot, the algorithm first maps out the plot file, then goes back and fills it in with nonces which equates to a ton of random writes. If you plot to a PMR drive first and then copy over, then you end up with just a few large sequential writes to the SMR drive which avoids the architectural bottleneck.
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@p0int_scale
This is so true
I'm currently on day 5 of plotting an 8TB SMR and only 58% right now
I have been going back and forth, using xplotter, between 8 cores and 1 core due to the need of my laptop during work hours
But I've found that even at 8 cores, the 10Knonces/min goes fast, but the HDD writing scoops is the hold up.
Somewhere between 2-3cores and the the nonces/min finishes around the same time as the HDD writing scoops
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@mrgoldy Just use like 6 cores if you need your laptop all the time. 2 cores to spare for multitasking, the rest for plotting.
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@p0int_scale
Thanks for the 6 core suggestion, it made me think about why I haven't been able to work while running 6 cores and actually just found that reducing my mem to 3G has helped immensely!
-sn 800000001 -n 29722128 -t 6 -path H:\Burst\plots -mem 3Ghow important is this mem setting? should I just change it to 1G?
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@mrgoldy Depends on how much RAM you have.
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@p0int_scale right, I have 8G, but setting this to 3G seems to have little impact to nonces/min or writing scoops.
what is the purpose of the mem setting? because reducing it seems to be more beneficial to running 6 cores and not affecting my performance.
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@mrgoldy Use 3G with 6 cores.
Your RAM has a big impact on writing scoops. Your cores have a big impact on nonces/min.
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@p0int_scale
Thank you, that's good to know. I'm still new to all this
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Hi @oakmcilwain,
I'm in the midst of plotting 5 x 8TB Seagate SMRs. Plotting straight to the drive isn't the way to go. I have two 2TB 7200 RPM internal drives and I gpu plot to these instead, then copy the plots to the SMR drives. I only plot to one of the 2TB drives at a time...this way I can use larger stagger values per plot (I have limited RAM). When one plot finishes I use Teraplot to move the plot file to the SMR while simultaneously starting the next plot to the other 2TB drive.
I use 6 smaller plot files to fill one 8TB Seagate. I can process two plot files per day, so I'm looking at 3 days per drive. The reason for many smaller files is two-fold: the gpu plotter has hung up on me mid-plot a few times when I've tried to do larger plots (3+ TB) and I'm now limited to about 1.8TB max by the 2TB drives. Not sure if anything I said is useful, but this is how I'm doing it now. I wish I could justify paying more for equal capacity non-SMR drives, but I can't. Good luck to you!
Evo
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@p0int_scale said in Plotting Very Slow - 5TB Seagate Drive:
@mrgoldy Use 3G with 6 cores.
Your RAM has a big impact on writing scoops. Your cores have a big impact on nonces/min.Actually, ram has no impact on writing scoops. More ram just means a bigger chunk written before the next set is calculated. You can plot just as fast with 512MB of ram as 8GB dedicated to Xplotter,.
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This video:
or this:
May be of help to improve performance of that drive. As you can see from the first video the performance is improved dramatically.
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@ScreamIndevnull yes, this was actually discussed here once
https://forums.burst-team.us/topic/3985/singling-out-one-hdd-for-changing-write-cache-settings/5
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@p0int_scale The write speed is improved dramatically which makes me wonder if Seagate botched something in the FW. The video shows a read/write test before and after. Though I do not know what the impact would be writing nonces, but I am sure it improves mining speed... probably helps writing nonces also.
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Thank you for a truly awesome video, I purchased a seagate before and its plotting time was very slow, as the computer continually had to wait for the hard drive to write the scoops.
I have just purchased another 5TB seagate , slow plotting again.
Watched you video, and made the setting adjustments, woooohoooo, scoop writing is no longer a problem!!!!A big thank you.
Once I I have finished plotting, should I change the settings back?
Thanks
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Great Stuff !
I have mixed vendors of my HDs Seagate, WD etc. in my miner and one of mine was a Seagate, always wondering why it is that slow , Problem solved

