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.
