Problem when plotting with XPlotter

fpdragon

Hi,

I'm currently trying to plot my first larger disk. It's a brand new USB 3.0 Seagate Backup Plus Hub with 8TB.

I'm experiencing a very strange behavior on my Intel i7-3635QM powered notebook with 8GB RAM.

-) Formatted disk as NTFS with 64kB.

-) Started XPlotter as Admin with 4 Treads.

Tool begins to prepare nonces blocks as expected until RAM is full?!
After about 4000 nonces the tool begins to write on the disk with full speed. (arround 100MB/sec).

disk write stops as expecte becaus no more nonces to write are cached.
CPU is still "running hot" at 100% and is creating nonces until next ~4000 nonces are prepared.
Then again full speed disk write. And so on...

This works fine for some minutes but then suddenly the disk write rate drops to about 2 to 4 MB/s.
And of course the CPU rate drops down since the RAM is permanently filled with nonces.

When I stop xplotter it seems that disk is continuing doing something.

Is there anything I have to consider on?
Please HELP. It would be an endless story if i continue plotting with that speed.
I guess I have enough CPU power and enough USB3.0 bandwidth to plot the disk in some days.

haitch

@fpdragon Welcome to the world of Shingled Magnetic Recording plotting .....

Go read: https://forums.burst-team.us/topic/2394/shingled-magnetic-recording-smr

fpdragon

@haitch
Thank you very much.
Very interesting and this is exactly the effect I have noticed.
I'm currently searching and thinking of a solution of this problem...

Garbear

Sounds like the same drives I bought 7 of. They scan plots just as fast as any other drive I have but they plot like shit! After 3% or so the write speeds drop to 5-10mb/s at best. So I had to alter my plotting ways to smaller 1tb plots to drives that write at max speeds then move them to the 8tb seagate backup usb drives at full 100mb/s speeds, go figure!

fpdragon

@haitch

Ok... I watched videos... I read posts...

I tried to enable caches. I played around with other tools and so on. But every time it comes again to the 5-10MB/sec.

Is it that I just bought crap? Are there other disks which are not having these problems with the same space?
What about this one:
https://www.amazon.de/dp/B00S1LNNFY/ref=psdc_430129031_t1_B01EIP2ZV4
(LaCie Porsche Design 8 TB Desktop Drive)

Does they have the same SMR technique?

For me it is not possible to create the plot files on an other good (non SMR) disk and move the files afterwards to the SMR disk. I don't have enough space for doing that.

Please, give me recommendations.
Should I give the disk back to amazon and get an other one or is there a realistic solution to fill the disk directly with plot data?

Is it recommended to split the plot files for example to 500GB fragments. Those 500GB I should be able to create on an other disk and move it afterwards to the SMR? Just file after file?

Thanks.
I appreciate the expertise here in this forum.

haitch

@fpdragon To improve performance, either

a) use a different miner to plot a non-optimized file, these get written sequentially and don't impact SMR as much as random writes.

b) Create optimized plots on a regular drive then move them to the SMR drive, this again will sequentially write.

As @garbear says, they mine just fine - I have a munch - it's just getting them plotted that hurts.

fpdragon

@haitch
Thank you for the info.

So is it good to make multiple 500GB plots (with nonce offsets) and move them in junks on the SMR drive?
Or is this not recommended when the plot is fragmented into more than one file?

haitch

@fpdragon It's okay to do them 500GB at a time - there is some read performance penalty but it's not huge

fpdragon

Is there any 8TB drive that has no SMR?

For example what's about with this one?
https://www.amazon.de/gp/product/B00S1LNNFY/

For now I will use the 500GB fragment solution but I'd prefer to have one plotting disk and then move the plot files 1:1 to the SMR archive disks. But I'm having problems in finding out which disk has which technology inside.

I just found out that my WD My Passport 2TB 2.5inch also seems to have SMR xD

haitch

@fpdragon I use WD Reds and HGST Deskstars - neither are SMR.

manfromafar

@fpdragon said in Problem when plotting with XPlotter:

Is there any 8TB drive that has no SMR?

For example what's about with this one?
https://www.amazon.de/gp/product/B00S1LNNFY/

For now I will use the 500GB fragment solution but I'd prefer to have one plotting disk and then move the plot files 1:1 to the SMR archive disks. But I'm having problems in finding out which disk has which technology inside.

I just found out that my WD My Passport 2TB 2.5inch also seems to have SMR xD

Yes both WD and Seagate make them but for seagate their only in the internal drives. Non of the external kits are non SMR drives

fpdragon

Just for info:

LaCie Porsche Design 8 TB Desktop Drive
is also SMR.
I bought it and after some hours I brought it back to the shop.

Now I have bought a
Seagate IronWolf NAS HDD ST8000VN0022 - 8TB 7200rpm
that's an internal drive that I put into a USB 3.0 case.

This is now working for some time without any problem. Bottleneck is now the CPU.

arihan

Yeh i did my 8TB seagate archive drive by writing 1TB plots to a old standard 2TB drive and then copying it over and repeat till it was full. Was much quicker than plotting to the 8TB directly. Gonna try steer clear of them now!