lol I meant non-SMR
I just had some sake, it'll cross wires in my brain =D

Also thanks @haitch running as admin jumped right past the 0.02 on all 3 bats. Averaging about 14k on 3 drives at once

Thanks @haitch. I have an 8TB Ironwolf in a syno that im not using that I can plot to. But I'm trying to figure out the most efficient way to get all three non-SMR drives plotted as quick as I can with only one non-SMR.

Just reselling the drives for a loss and buying SMR drives is starting to sound appealing.

Can I plot direct with the gpu plotter? I set up my 1060 to plot and it was up to like 30k/sec but it seemed to freeze at 0.02%.

And if I did use gpu instead, will it still take 2 weeks?

I split the gpu into 3 bats with 64 core/640mb and it was flying at 30k on all 3 at once. Then it froze at 0.02% like when I was solo gpu plotting.

Or do you have to plot direct to a non-SMR first and then move it over?
What do you use to move the plot file? The optimizer software?

@haitch Ok perfect. So how much RAM will the miner use if I set the plotter to 150% of my system ram and plot in direct mode?

@haitch Thank you so much! I will test this out, I am sure I can get it working great. I am also a "but why" kind of guy.

If it is irrelevant, am I wrong in thinking "more stagger is better"? In the doc linked here it says:
"<stagger size> - You can think of stagger size as a ‘buffer’. This is how much will be read into memory before writing to the hard drive. The place that stagger size really comes into play, is during mining. During mining, the larger the stagger size the better on your drives, the less seek time, and faster your computer will read through the plots, thus faster deadline submission and more of a chance of hitting a block. Setting your stagger size equal to 75% of your total memory (or up to the amount of memory you have,) is a decent default. I.E. if my computer has 10GB of RAM, I would set my stagger size to 8192. Or something close to that, my math is not exactly perfect, but a stagger size of 8192 or larger is great, if you have the memory for it!"

edit: I also want to gpu assist plot but only cpu mine.

Thanks for the information!

So is my thinking right to want a bigger stagger size? I have gpus I could use to plot faster, but I get out of resources errors (I am assuming because I dont have 18gb of ram on them). It seems like my choice to have a bigger stagger size is significantly slowing down my plot time.

When I mine, how do I set stagger size? Or is it read from my plots?

I read that a larger stagger size will reduce the stress on your HDD, so I purchased another 16gb to bring my PC up to 24gb. I also have three 8tb HDDs to mine on.

I would like to mine with 18gb (75%) of my system ram. When I plot my drives I am plotting it planning to use the whole 18gb stagger.

How does this work when mining on multiple hard drives?
1 - Does the miner only access one drive at a time but in sequence?
1a - If so, will that slow down my mining speed because it only accesses one drive at a time?
2 - Would it be faster to mine 3 drives simultaneously with 6gb of stagger?
2a - Would I then plot my drives with a 6gb stagger instead of 18gb?

Sorry for the basic questions and thank you for any information!