Things that farming Chia will make you aware of.

Mon 24 May 2021
By Bram

When you farm Chia, the proof-of-space blockchained coin, you learn a few new things.

  • Which PCIe generation your motherboard offers
  • NVMe performance
  • NVMe endurance
  • The fstrim command
  • XFS options like crc=0
  • What the term JBOD means
  • The performance of NFS over your LAN
  • The thermal characteristics of your drives
  • The difference between peak write bandwidth and sustained write bandwidth
  • The Crucial P1 and PNY XLR8 have incredibly slow write bandwidth. Avoid!

So far, this has been a fully educational excercise, with zero financial pay-off: My 6 drives can't compete with the netspace. But stream-lining your computer for plotting was a fun exercise in optimization.

If nothing else, I at least got a rather popular Open Source Tool out of it, in my portfolio: ChiaHarvestGraph and its sister tools ChiaPlotGraph and ChiaHeightGraph.

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