holly shit! I didn't notice a dog in background because I was so attentive for what he is saying! I never even focused that much in school or college that what professor is saying, lol, like I focus on his videos lol
Poor puppy dog!!! Hope she finds some SAS 10K drives in the garbage for her farming! Outstanding video with excellent content, as always. I'm going for the red pill- excited to see how well this works! Thank you, Mr. Sloth man.
Amazing content as usual! Your videos are always one step ahead of the Chia inner machinations. Who knew there was a way to plot just as fast without the expensive NVME and not have to worry about replacing your hard drives.
Thank you so much for putting your time and effort into these videos, they're so great and easy to understand and you provide great links in the comments so I can find exactly what I need or want to look at from the video as well as a bunch of other options. You really go above and beyond. I have just recently started my IT degree and even if I don't end up making money off of Chia it will still be a really interesting project for me. I'm ordering a renewed Dell Precision T7810 and I can't wait to get it set up and mess around with it!
I love your comment, it's humbling. I started out just like you working through the lower echelons of IT and learning -- building labs at home like what you are describing is something i only ever see from the most competent IT/engineers. I'm sure you will be well on your way to success.
I'm always watching but need to drop my comment lol. I use to have so many of those server grade drives when working as a consultant. Sigh I miss the opportunity back in the days. lol
Thanks a lot for the video mate! It'd be awesome to see some more hands-on instructional videos for non-techies like myself, as I'm sure some viewers would like to see how to actually connect up these drives to the dell 5810 for example... Keep up the awesomeness! :)
Also - it's worth noting that you don't need controllers that are flashed to IT mode if you can't find any (or they're not cheap enough). If you get one with RAID firmware, you can just set up a series of single-drive RAID 0 arrays, which is the same as just a single drive (to my knowledge, it's been years since I've been into this stuff). I've got an LSI controller running with four such "arrays" for long-term storage, and it's running just fine. In fact, it's just running as a file server at the moment, because this weekend is set aside for the woodworking involved in building a housing for all the external SAS temp drives. Wish I could get more cores, though. I've only got a pair of 6-core E5-2420s in mine...anything more was prohibitively expensive compared to the budget. Should be able to get 3 cores on 5 drives OK though, if I stagger them a bit.
You and Intermit tech are making me doubt my entire build lol. That's ok, just means I know what I want to replace or what to buy next if I want to expand the operations. The benefit of the 5900x and NVMe build I have is that it can turn into my next gaming PC when it is done with chia, especially since I talked the store into letting me buy a 3070 they had for their custom builds since I was buying the parts for a full PC from them and they work on commission :)
I'm glad to have come across this video before I decided to spend money on enterprise SSD's for my server. I lucked out on getting a Dell R710 server and a Dell Powervault with just over 23TB already in it...for FREE!! Now I can put them to good use with having to spend little to no money out of the gate. I may have to get larger capacity drives for the R710 since it only has four 146GB 15k SAS drives in it. The powervault has (23) 900GB 10k SAS and (1) 1.2TB 10K SAS drive already installed. Now to watch more of your videos to better understand Chia farming.
Hi man, great tip regarding SAS drives. I purchased 14 and and different controllers and tested a lot and they are working great. Regarding my results, I found best performance with 9260-8i in 8 disk raid over 9211-8i in IT mode. My disks are 300gb 10k SAS HPs. The key to the best performance was that the 9260-8i supports RAID controller cache as well as disk cache and also "always write back" and "always read ahead". These are all "high end" raid controller features (for the time the 9260 was designed). I have found that they really enhance the disks and extract the most performance, rather than just running them on their default performance via IT passthrough on the 9211-8i. I find the best mb/s disk performance and best cpu utilization (with my xeon e5-2678v3 12 core and 32gb ram) are 7 parallel plots with 3 threads and 4800mb ram each. This makes the 8 disk array work at between 700-800mb/s. What results have you got plotting to each individual drive in IT mode?
Hi David, what was the performance difference between the 9260-8i in 8 disk raid vs 9211-8i in IT mode? You mentioned 8 disk array was between 700 to 800 mb/s. What was the speed of the 9211-8i would you say? Thanks!
@@TheRealPhilipK In order to compare apples to apples, I setup the 9260 in 8x single disk raid 0. The drives, with the 9260 extra features, performed better individually in Crystaldiskmark than with the 9211 passthrough. The main difference was in SEQ1M(Q1T1) : 130mb/s write under 9260 and 75mb/s write under 9211. Other stats were close enough to not matter much.
I have not invested the time to do full multiday plotting comparisons between both cards with 8 drives in both cases. Plotting with 9211 individual drives and 2core 3390ram was leading to over 24h estimation after a couple of hours (for a batch of 8 plots on 8 separate disks, one plot per hdd). So I didn't let it run. I would say that the main problem is that single hdd performance cannot even saturate 2 threads, so a tremendous amount of CPU is being wasted and the single hdds are a big bottleneck. For this reason, I would always raid at least 2 hdds in raid 0 for every 2 thread plot. I would raid more disks together if you want to use more than 2 threads. And if you are going to raid, then IT mode defeats the purpose. And 9260 is better than 9211 in raid mode because of the extra features like "read ahead", "caching" and "always write back"
Thanks for sharing your knowledge and expertise in such a practical and understandable way. I was watching Bitcoin when it started and could have bought it at $0.25. It went to $0.50 and people rejoiced and sold and doubled their money. If I were holding coins like you , I probably wouldn't have made it as long as you did. I didn't buy Bitcoin at $0.50 because I was sure that the powers at be would never allow another currency to take hold. Couldn't have been more wrong. I also thought that Starbucks would go bust because no one would wait in line to pay for a $5 cup of coffee. Couldn't have been more wrong. But this is different. I, like you and many others, see the potential here. Thanks again and keep the vids coming. Would love to see you do a walk thru of putting these parts together. Thanks again.
Man!! You are the most clear person in whole UA-cam!!! New subscriber here :). Do you think you can do how to videos on the cli for like newbies??? Or videos like this one and showing the actual step by step build for any of us who wants to buy through your links and do the exact same thing? Keep up the good work!!!!👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻
amazing info! I actually have about 15 drives sitting around that are older 10k and 15k drives. Now I just gotta figure out how to make a case to hold them.
Hey there, watched your last Videos, man thats a lot to process. Your content hold me on the chair for hours. The prices you have there are not the same here in Germany. At least you put a Euro sign instead of the Dollar with your prices but mostly the prices are way up. These sas drives cost at least 40 € over here but still not bad as a drive for 375 that you can throw away after a while. On the other hand how long u think these HDDs will continue working. As they are used its difficult to estimate or am i wrong? The drive in the Video is with the server adapter so as i understood this is not needed just the blank drive? If it comes like it is why not using a server (G7/G8/G9) where you can plug these straight. I guess there´s a way to run windows on a server. Thanks for the Video and all the others too, helped a lot
Ok last question. Your previous videos talk about connecting the drives. But not to much about powering them. If you have 24 drive how exactly do you power them? I've only did small builds so I don't know the correct terminology. When you were talking about powering the drive you showed a cable that had 3 ports to power drives. Which would mean for 24 drive the power supply would have to have 8 modular connections for that specific type in the back. I know I'm missing something. And as much as I google and try to redefine, I'm not seeing clear answers. I just got my workstation delivered today. And I need to get the power figured out for the drives. Please help... respectfully!
Thanks for the great video. I'm quickly going to buy 40 of these before price skyrockets. Is any '300GB SAS 10K' disk going to be fine or just disks mentioned by you? Is there anything we should be aware of when buying these drives? Thanks again and I'm already looking forward to next video.
Really want to get into mining but haven’t seen anything GPU worthy to invest (super expensive). Chia struck my interest because of the simplicity of it to get started. Knowing that old rewritable Hard drives are plausible changes everything. Thanks for such a great info video
@@ScottPlude its disturbing to me that there are so many people commenting "thats impossible you're lying" without doing their own research. Thanks for replying to this video / confirming your own findings, gentlemen.
Im sure that we all would love for you to make a video tutorial for this. Cuz it would be of great use for newbies and new miners like me lol. Love your content man.. cheers
@Josue267 NO, you need at least a 1TB drive, which will support 4 if they're staggered. I would only use NVME drives designed for random-access. Never use SSD(sata) or HDD you will kill them. SAS is a good idea, but they are all long gone, CHIA scam has sold-out everything, just like GPUS everything is gone. Here in ASIA you can't even find HDD's anymore, and NVME's are hard to find so are SSD's. I have seen a plot vary from 108GB (final) to 350GB during the process of reduction post phase 1. Sure you can plot -k31 ( < 108gb ) but they're no longer used. For one plot I would not go less than a 512GB drive, if its SSD SAS, if you can find it.
Can't temp space requirements creep above 300gb/plot or does that only apply to how ssd's handle writes? Also are you doing some kind of RAID configuration or just one plot per drive? Excuse my ignorance, I'm not very familiar with SAS or server gear, but am super interested in using these SAS drives as an alternative to burning out my NVME drives.
I have in my closet HP Proliant ML110 g9 with 8x600gb SAS drives last 3 years and I was asking myself why I am not able to throw it away? Now I have the answer! Thanks!
You are a true gentleman. Your videos are AMAZING. New to your world and SAS. In your expert view, is a SAS a SAS and if I can find 7.2K or 15K, that 15K bests 10K bests 7.2K? Or would 7.2K manage these tasks as well? I don't really see "TBW" or that type of rating. Are these astronomical compared to S3700 no matter the SAS? Sorry to ask, but you are raising a newb here. Thanks!
I just subbed! :) Interesting to know this! I have a bunch of older 250-300 GB 7200 RPM drives. Also some newer 1-4 TB drives as well. Also have an unknown SAS card with SATA-adapters for connect like 8 or 16 drives on it, don't remember how many. Is it worth to use this equipment to setup a Chia farm/plot? What CPU do you recommend? Isn't a Ryzen CPU quite efficient if you need many threads?
Great vid. Two comments is that you have to find a way to mount all the drives so they don’t kill themselves Due to vibration. Your 3D case is great but not everyone has a CR10. Second, the cost of HBAs has quadruple so the $28 hba in the video isn’t accurate at this point in time. Love the content on this channel. Keep up the great work.
The HBA i showed is actually on sale on ebay right now -- there were a few -- in the video description there are even a few HBAs for under $70 on amazon right now. -- The 3d printer comment is noted, I am sure im part of a small number of people with a 3d printer that big lol
nice concept. its starting to get hard finding decent priced sas adapters , cables and adaptors so i prefer use those soon to become rare adapters for plot storage managment, and go with server grade nvmes with lower write speeds but high endurance
The company I work for has boxes of these 300GB SAS drives doing nothing, with many more still in powered off servers in racks. They really are garbage to throw away. After we virtualized our bare metal servers, the servers ended up being decommissioned and stored away in a junk pile at a remote location. We scrapped the hard drives, memory modules and PCIe cards to keep in the office just in case we might need them for something. We also have a good bit of spare SAS HBAs that are no longer in use.
Many enterprise variants on eBay with pre-populated drives and psu's. (NetApp DS2246, Dell MD3220, etc) just make sure you get the right sas cable from your HBA to connect them. Typically you can get the whole shelf (24 drives) for an average of $16/drive (600Gb 10k SAS). No need to mess around with external PSU's, jumper plugs or 3d-printed drive holders.
Bro, congrats! Great informative channel ...but damn those parts selling fast. Good for you tho, keep up good work. *I have no idea what I'm doing, that's gonna be my first side hassle based 100% on youtube channels.
Hey! This is awesome!! 2 questions, 15k drive is better than 10k drive? And on the other side, may i use this model? I can get it cheap in my country : Lsi 9260-8 6gb 8 Port Sas 512mb Cache Raid 0 1 5 6
Just picked up a t5600, some RAM, 8 10k drives, 2 e5-2690s, an hba, a 16tb HD through your channel links... I think all I need is some heat gel for the chip swap and I'm good to go. Should be a fun adventure
Looks like I need to buy Sata breakout cables to connect the drives to a power supply? Do I need to get fans, and external enclosure and an external power supply to do this 10k method? Is that implied??
Thank you so much for the videos, they have been incredibly helpful! Quick question, I just bought a bunch of Western Digital 300GB 10K 2.5" SAS 6Gb/s WD3001BKHG off eBay for extremely cheap and I just noticed that they have a cache size of 32 mb while a lot of the drives you have recommended in your description are 64 mb. Is this going to be a problem if I want to replicate your build? Thanks so much for your time :)
I enjoyed your content and subscribed! P.S. You might want to change your camera settings a bit because it was focused on your shoulders but your face was blurry.
Great Video, great content! I found some 15k SAS server harddrives really cheap. Now I was wondering, do they fit in a desktop computer with any SAS PCIe card or do I have to check if the controller supports those drives specifically? What's your experience?
SAS drives should work with any SAS raid controller or HBA card. The only possible issue that comes to my mind is that some controllers (like b110i and b120i on HP servers) support only SATA drives, despite using SAS interface, so you do need to verify that your card supports SAS drives
You can get a used server such as a Dell R720XD SFF 24 bay dual socket Xeon CPU starting around $600 on eBay. They usually come with HBAs or Raid controllers such as the PERC H710. Not bad for a plotting system using inexpensive 2.5" 10K SAS drives. I have an R720XD 16 bay I used for my VSAN lab for several years.
Amazing video, specially making chia greener with re use of SAS drives, great recommendation. I wish i could have it elsewhere, simply the noise would be a deal breaker for me.
Great content as usual! I have 2 older desktops I was going to get rid of! Double core 4 threads I3s ...would you repurpose them to mine Chia? And was is the best way to plot using multiple rigs?
Very ...very interesting! I will look into making a spare plotting computer with dual cpus for a future chia build. Why not save the world from more garbage by using it to make money lol 👍 Great tips Sloth much appreciated.
@@SlothTechTV Nice, then "LSI 9211-8i P20 IT Mode for ZFS FreeNAS unRAID 6Gbps SAS HBA" should work like a charm, right? Do I have to look or "unRAID" adapters?
Yeah. This isn't really an option for us. Also if you're a casual like I am (20tb max on a 2600x) and plan on using your nVME drive for your new PC build later on (CPU's are starting to become readily available now with price drops coming sooner rather than later), then your nVME drives will be fine.
I have been watching and re-watching most of your videos and I have learned so much that I have been placing orders and setting up a workspace to give this a go. Your videos are fantastic and informative so please keep them coming. Thanks you for the links since it is a way that we can help support the channel and get linked to just the products that you are discussing!! Here are a few questions that I have been collecting across the videos that I can't quite answer: What mods have you done to your Creality 3D Printer? I'll be using the LSI SAS9200-16e in a T7910 connected to the HP 487738-001 24 Bay SAS mounted on a PCIE riser attached to the server box. What additional cables are you using to power the 24 drives running from the SF600 that don't come included with the power supply? (Power splitter cables?) Are you plugged into the 2 - 6PIN Peripheral/SATA power ports on the SF600? Could you show a picture of the wiring harness side of the power supply? Where does the printed power plug Female that you have mounted to the Farm Box go to? I know you say to lay down 6 to 7 layers fill for the base in the 3D pint your own server video .. I was wondering if you laid down several layers from a black spool first and then switched spools and printed in the white? Is this black layer in the Thingiverse files or do I just pause the job and switch spools? (3D printing is new to me - I bought the CR10 S4)
excellent video! I have two questions that I would like you to shed some light. Q1. would 15k drive be better in performance than the 10k drive? Q2. should I RAID0 them together or run these disks individually? Thanks!
Great idea and you can find lots of them on Ebay tested for >10 each but not really Energy efficient. 7-8 Watts each at higher loads x10 is 70-80 watts not counting the power supply and boards compared 2 watts or so for a 2TB GEN 3 speed NVMe to replace the 16TB’s I’m using on each PC would add about 80x8= 640 watts. 4 PC’s 2560 extra Watts.
Thank you for making these wonderful videos and share your own experience. I really do appreciate it. May I ask you a question regarding the SAS 10k drive that you mentioned, please? Can the 24 of Netapp DS2246 600GB 10K SAS HDD, be used to make one like you? Thank you for your reply. have a great day :)
I'm not sure if I am adding it up correctly but it looks like the 40plot/day system would cost well north of $2k. For that amount you could build 2 10700 systems that do a total of 50 plots per day and have enough left over for a spare NVME...
Is it better to use 2.5 or 3.5 SAS drives? In my humble opinion, at equivalent rotational speed the 2.5 sas drives consume less electricity, but maybe the 3.5s go faster. You are talking about an LSI 9210 but could a card like this HP SMART H240 SAS controllers work? Thanks Sloth Tech TV for your great job. Keep Up the good work. Thanks man !
The duplex difference between sata and sas is really a very minor difference. In reality, a spinning disk can only either read or write at once. The benefit of full duplex is that the SAS drive has a bigger queue, and also can store more "pending" requests as they also have bigger queues (SAS has queue depth of 254 vs SATA queue depth of 32). But again, even this difference is fairly minor. I see plot times of between 35k and 45k seconds on 15k sas w/ 128MB cache , and I see 36k to 48k on my 7200RPM enterprise SATA. Under full CPU load, the difference is negligible. That said, I definitely use 10k/15k SAS because they are dirt cheap, as you point out =D Though of course there is a power draw difference (ie 4 SAS vs 1 NVME drive).
You need to factor in the external chassis that will hold these drives. These do not come cheap. Yes, enormous Supermicro JBOD cases can be had for $300-$400 but these are super bulky and loud and they will need another $300ish to connect them to the main unit and quieten them down plus 2 HBA adapters, one for the main server and one for the chassis etc. The whole set-up is not exactly cheap. A desktop/tower SAS 8 bay unit could cost anything from $200 (if you are lucky) to $1,000-$2,000 depending on the manufacturer. For NVMe I bought myself 2 x 2 TB 3,300 TBW drives for 220 euros each. Maybe I was lucky to buy them early enough (1-2 weeks ago). For 1 TBW per plot these are good for approximately 6,000 plots or 600TB worth of plot files.
I have been doing this on my old system. I have 12 300G 10K SAS 2.5 drives all chugging. I already filled up my NAS with 18TB of plots and now need to figure out how to store more.
and remember kids, firecuda 520 and corsair mp600, recommended by the chia dev team, is like taking your hard earned money and tossing it in the trash, thanks chia dev team, I love 500 mb/s writes for a gen 4.0 nvme drive!
It is true that the old traditional HDD drives can be written and rewritten more times in comparison with SSD drives. On the other hand, HDD drives have a higher rate of failures and data errors due to the fact that they are constructed out f movable parts.
Man thank you so much for this video, I was looking for ssd drives for plotting but I was worried about their endurance but I see that sas drives in my country are on the same price or even more expensive, plus the connector you think that their price has started to climb?
Seth Estrada has a great video about why you shouldn’t mine chia as it’s too late for most common plebs like us. The time it would take to realize a profit is growing exponentially and you’d be risking your ROI on pure luck.
I just purchased 2x 450 15k SAS drives + 2x 600GB 15k SAS drives used all four for 40$ lol. A simple SAS HBA for 120$ new and a SFF8082 cable to 4x SFF8482 for 20$, should make for a fun little plotting project.
Great video. Is the 1 plot per drive a capacity bottleneck or a throughput one? I ask because i'm looking on ebay and finding 900GB equivalents that are only a few dollars more on avg and that would help inform a buying decision.
I watched the other videos, but have a lack of understanding on how to power these! A separate power supply is used I take it, but is there special cables from the power supply to the drives? I ordered the drives and the cables from your link but I don’t wanna have to receive them and then figure out I can’t power them up.
i made a separate video about powering the drives -- you do need an external power supply, and those sata power breakout cables linked in the video description.
@@SlothTechTV I bought the SAS drives, the HBA and the cables from your link. But the more I research It, It appears they are powered from the Card? I can't figure out why I need another power supply, or how to hook it up. I've watched all your recent videos "And am thankful for them" but can't find where this is covered.
Hey Sloth! 😁 I learned something today, trying to plot to two sata hdd's. In my case atleast it does not work. Cause when disc 1 works 100%, disc 2 goes to 0%, then disc 1 goes down to 0% and disc 2 goes up.. So only one of them can work 100%, they cant do that together.. For some reason. Can you confirm this is not a problem with the controller and SAS discs? Im about to buy some stuff.. But i dont wanna buy if this is the case.. 😜 I love the idea of using SAS disc's, its much cooler then SSD's i think.. Thats why i use one of my 70gb VelociRaptor disc's for Windows on my plotting machine.. 😁 Love your content about chia, really good stuff! 👍
Great video! I have a question regarding the hba card. Why do you want it to be on IT mode? wouldn't you want to put these 8 x 300GB drives on Raid 0 to gain R/W speed? IT mode will set the card to pass through without no raid
Putting drives in raid 0 should get them to work faster than one individual drive, but slower than the sum of their individual performances. There is a performance penalty for maintaining raid configuration
That dog is like "Draw me like one of your French girls, Jack..."
holly shit! I didn't notice a dog in background because I was so attentive for what he is saying! I never even focused that much in school or college that what professor is saying, lol, like I focus on his videos lol
I noticed that too. That canine is lit.
Poor puppy dog!!! Hope she finds some SAS 10K drives in the garbage for her farming! Outstanding video with excellent content, as always. I'm going for the red pill- excited to see how well this works! Thank you, Mr. Sloth man.
Amazing content as usual! Your videos are always one step ahead of the Chia inner machinations. Who knew there was a way to plot just as fast without the expensive NVME and not have to worry about replacing your hard drives.
Thank you so much for putting your time and effort into these videos, they're so great and easy to understand and you provide great links in the comments so I can find exactly what I need or want to look at from the video as well as a bunch of other options. You really go above and beyond. I have just recently started my IT degree and even if I don't end up making money off of Chia it will still be a really interesting project for me. I'm ordering a renewed Dell Precision T7810 and I can't wait to get it set up and mess around with it!
I love your comment, it's humbling. I started out just like you working through the lower echelons of IT and learning -- building labs at home like what you are describing is something i only ever see from the most competent IT/engineers. I'm sure you will be well on your way to success.
@@SlothTechTV I've been thinking about doing something like this anyways we can talk because i have some Questions on the whole thing
More, more, more of these! This is what we need. Good explanations. More details for the setup is appreciated.
Finally a resource who understands numbers! I was thinking about whether this would work, but didn't have the testing gear! Thanks for this!
Once again sir... you have brought amazing value to this community. You are a rock star! Thank you!
I appreciate that! Thank you.
Great video as always. The idea of reusing old SAS drives is simply amazing. Thank you :)
Loving the dog lazing about on the couch behind you man! 😂
I'm always watching but need to drop my comment lol. I use to have so many of those server grade drives when working as a consultant. Sigh I miss the opportunity back in the days. lol
I'm honored to have your comment!! :) ty for watching sir! You are my #1 watched youtube channel :)
My 600 plots are done on enterprise 15k sas drives in enterprise servers. Rock solid and endurance is crazy.
Is it fast enough to ploting?
could you tell what configuration did you do?
Do you RAID0 them?
Bro can u help me get to 600 plots please
that dog looks comfy in the back
Indeed :-D
LOL didn't even notice him until you pointed this out
Thanks, can't wait for the Elastic search video!
Thanks a lot for the video mate! It'd be awesome to see some more hands-on instructional videos for non-techies like myself, as I'm sure some viewers would like to see how to actually connect up these drives to the dell 5810 for example... Keep up the awesomeness! :)
Also - it's worth noting that you don't need controllers that are flashed to IT mode if you can't find any (or they're not cheap enough). If you get one with RAID firmware, you can just set up a series of single-drive RAID 0 arrays, which is the same as just a single drive (to my knowledge, it's been years since I've been into this stuff). I've got an LSI controller running with four such "arrays" for long-term storage, and it's running just fine. In fact, it's just running as a file server at the moment, because this weekend is set aside for the woodworking involved in building a housing for all the external SAS temp drives.
Wish I could get more cores, though. I've only got a pair of 6-core E5-2420s in mine...anything more was prohibitively expensive compared to the budget. Should be able to get 3 cores on 5 drives OK though, if I stagger them a bit.
Roger that!!! great suggestion ty for commenting.
I used the link, bought two of the 300GB 10k SAS. Got them in from Amazon today, received 10 of them instead. WIN!
Love your dog chillin back there 😂❤
@@razorback0z It's gonna buy all the drives!! 😂
She runs the show, I just follow directions.
You and Intermit tech are making me doubt my entire build lol.
That's ok, just means I know what I want to replace or what to buy next if I want to expand the operations.
The benefit of the 5900x and NVMe build I have is that it can turn into my next gaming PC when it is done with chia, especially since I talked the store into letting me buy a 3070 they had for their custom builds since I was buying the parts for a full PC from them and they work on commission :)
I'm glad to have come across this video before I decided to spend money on enterprise SSD's for my server. I lucked out on getting a Dell R710 server and a Dell Powervault with just over 23TB already in it...for FREE!! Now I can put them to good use with having to spend little to no money out of the gate. I may have to get larger capacity drives for the R710 since it only has four 146GB 15k SAS drives in it. The powervault has (23) 900GB 10k SAS and (1) 1.2TB 10K SAS drive already installed. Now to watch more of your videos to better understand Chia farming.
Hi man, great tip regarding SAS drives. I purchased 14 and and different controllers and tested a lot and they are working great. Regarding my results, I found best performance with 9260-8i in 8 disk raid over 9211-8i in IT mode. My disks are 300gb 10k SAS HPs.
The key to the best performance was that the 9260-8i supports RAID controller cache as well as disk cache and also "always write back" and "always read ahead". These are all "high end" raid controller features (for the time the 9260 was designed). I have found that they really enhance the disks and extract the most performance, rather than just running them on their default performance via IT passthrough on the 9211-8i.
I find the best mb/s disk performance and best cpu utilization (with my xeon e5-2678v3 12 core and 32gb ram) are 7 parallel plots with 3 threads and 4800mb ram each. This makes the 8 disk array work at between 700-800mb/s.
What results have you got plotting to each individual drive in IT mode?
Hi David, what was the performance difference between the 9260-8i in 8 disk raid vs 9211-8i in IT mode? You mentioned 8 disk array was between 700 to 800 mb/s. What was the speed of the 9211-8i would you say? Thanks!
@@TheRealPhilipK In order to compare apples to apples, I setup the 9260 in 8x single disk raid 0. The drives, with the 9260 extra features, performed better individually in Crystaldiskmark than with the 9211 passthrough. The main difference was in SEQ1M(Q1T1) : 130mb/s write under 9260 and 75mb/s write under 9211.
Other stats were close enough to not matter much.
I have not invested the time to do full multiday plotting comparisons between both cards with 8 drives in both cases. Plotting with 9211 individual drives and 2core 3390ram was leading to over 24h estimation after a couple of hours (for a batch of 8 plots on 8 separate disks, one plot per hdd). So I didn't let it run.
I would say that the main problem is that single hdd performance cannot even saturate 2 threads, so a tremendous amount of CPU is being wasted and the single hdds are a big bottleneck.
For this reason, I would always raid at least 2 hdds in raid 0 for every 2 thread plot. I would raid more disks together if you want to use more than 2 threads.
And if you are going to raid, then IT mode defeats the purpose. And 9260 is better than 9211 in raid mode because of the extra features like "read ahead", "caching" and "always write back"
Man you re amazing;) congrats and thankyou for the best chia UA-camr ever
I did a similar setup with my old HP G7 ESXI host. Raid 0'd 8x of these, been working well
I like your way of explaining things. And thank you for giving us alternative ways of plotting in acost effective way
This would have been nice two days ago...ughh! Good stuff.
Lol right? I think I spent over $600 on nvme already
@@SupahNin10dohp your PSU probably has a easier set up so it's all good?
Thanks for sharing your knowledge and expertise in such a practical and understandable way. I was watching Bitcoin when it started and could have bought it at $0.25. It went to $0.50 and people rejoiced and sold and doubled their money. If I were holding coins like you , I probably wouldn't have made it as long as you did. I didn't buy Bitcoin at $0.50 because I was sure that the powers at be would never allow another currency to take hold. Couldn't have been more wrong. I also thought that Starbucks would go bust because no one would wait in line to pay for a $5 cup of coffee. Couldn't have been more wrong. But this is different. I, like you and many others, see the potential here. Thanks again and keep the vids coming. Would love to see you do a walk thru of putting these parts together. Thanks again.
Man!! You are the most clear person in whole UA-cam!!! New subscriber here :).
Do you think you can do how to videos on the cli for like newbies??? Or videos like this one and showing the actual step by step build for any of us who wants to buy through your links and do the exact same thing? Keep up the good work!!!!👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻
I just found a pile of these in my basement from an old PowerEdge R710. This is awesome.
amazing info! I actually have about 15 drives sitting around that are older 10k and 15k drives. Now I just gotta figure out how to make a case to hold them.
Hey there, watched your last Videos, man thats a lot to process. Your content hold me on the chair for hours. The prices you have there are not the same here in Germany. At least you put a Euro sign instead of the Dollar with your prices but mostly the prices are way up. These sas drives cost at least 40 € over here but still not bad as a drive for 375 that you can throw away after a while. On the other hand how long u think these HDDs will continue working. As they are used its difficult to estimate or am i wrong? The drive in the Video is with the server adapter so as i understood this is not needed just the blank drive? If it comes like it is why not using a server (G7/G8/G9) where you can plug these straight. I guess there´s a way to run windows on a server. Thanks for the Video and all the others too, helped a lot
I wish this video would have come out before 5am this morning. I just ordered a bunch of sas ssd's to go with the hp proliant I just ordered.
Love the vids! Maybe you can make a tutorial vid on how to set up a t5810 rig with the hard drives from this vid. And A to Z tutorial of sorts.
Build is so cheap i said "wtf" I bought 22 drives, the Dell and the processors. At least I could help support your channel!
Thank you so much!!! I so truly appreciate the support!!!
Can you also do 2 processors on the 5810?
@@djrythmn1 nope the t5810 is a single socket workstation
Ok last question. Your previous videos talk about connecting the drives. But not to much about powering them. If you have 24 drive how exactly do you power them? I've only did small builds so I don't know the correct terminology. When you were talking about powering the drive you showed a cable that had 3 ports to power drives. Which would mean for 24 drive the power supply would have to have 8 modular connections for that specific type in the back. I know I'm missing something. And as much as I google and try to redefine, I'm not seeing clear answers. I just got my workstation delivered today. And I need to get the power figured out for the drives. Please help... respectfully!
Funny, I too have a comfy dog in the backgroud.
Seth Estrada recommened checking out your video so i want to give him credit for that.
Thanks for the great video. I'm quickly going to buy 40 of these before price skyrockets. Is any '300GB SAS 10K' disk going to be fine or just disks mentioned by you? Is there anything we should be aware of when buying these drives? Thanks again and I'm already looking forward to next video.
Really want to get into mining but haven’t seen anything GPU worthy to invest (super expensive). Chia struck my interest because of the simplicity of it to get started. Knowing that old rewritable Hard drives are plausible changes everything. Thanks for such a great info video
Thank you, Brother! Yet again, great information!
600GB 15000 rpm * 8 in RAID0, how is this setup? Also is 15000 rpm is better than 10000 rpm? Is it make a difference in overall plot time?
Been using some of my older servers and farming Chia. I hate that you let out one of my secrets though!!
yeap, me too! This is how I am doing it.
ditto!
@@ScottPlude its disturbing to me that there are so many people commenting "thats impossible you're lying" without doing their own research. Thanks for replying to this video / confirming your own findings, gentlemen.
Same had afew t7500's around :P
@@mwils51 if I have dell server I can just use that to plot chia? And hook 20 drives up to that server rgt?
Im sure that we all would love for you to make a video tutorial for this.
Cuz it would be of great use for newbies and new miners like me lol.
Love your content man.. cheers
I was way ahead of you here. The 300gb 10k rpm sas drives are only $11 each on ebay. ;) Have fun.
@Josue267 NO, you need at least a 1TB drive, which will support 4 if they're staggered. I would only use NVME drives designed for random-access. Never use SSD(sata) or HDD you will kill them. SAS is a good idea, but they are all long gone, CHIA scam has sold-out everything, just like GPUS everything is gone. Here in ASIA you can't even find HDD's anymore, and NVME's are hard to find so are SSD's. I have seen a plot vary from 108GB (final) to 350GB during the process of reduction post phase 1. Sure you can plot -k31 ( < 108gb ) but they're no longer used.
For one plot I would not go less than a 512GB drive, if its SSD SAS, if you can find it.
Can't temp space requirements creep above 300gb/plot or does that only apply to how ssd's handle writes? Also are you doing some kind of RAID configuration or just one plot per drive? Excuse my ignorance, I'm not very familiar with SAS or server gear, but am super interested in using these SAS drives as an alternative to burning out my NVME drives.
I have in my closet HP Proliant ML110 g9 with 8x600gb SAS drives last 3 years and I was asking myself why I am not able to throw it away? Now I have the answer! Thanks!
You are a true gentleman. Your videos are AMAZING. New to your world and SAS. In your expert view, is a SAS a SAS and if I can find 7.2K or 15K, that 15K bests 10K bests 7.2K? Or would 7.2K manage these tasks as well? I don't really see "TBW" or that type of rating. Are these astronomical compared to S3700 no matter the SAS? Sorry to ask, but you are raising a newb here. Thanks!
I just subbed! :) Interesting to know this! I have a bunch of older 250-300 GB 7200 RPM drives. Also some newer 1-4 TB drives as well. Also have an unknown SAS card with SATA-adapters for connect like 8 or 16 drives on it, don't remember how many. Is it worth to use this equipment to setup a Chia farm/plot?
What CPU do you recommend? Isn't a Ryzen CPU quite efficient if you need many threads?
Great vid. Two comments is that you have to find a way to mount all the drives so they don’t kill themselves Due to vibration. Your 3D case is great but not everyone has a CR10. Second, the cost of HBAs has quadruple so the $28 hba in the video isn’t accurate at this point in time. Love the content on this channel. Keep up the great work.
The HBA i showed is actually on sale on ebay right now -- there were a few -- in the video description there are even a few HBAs for under $70 on amazon right now. -- The 3d printer comment is noted, I am sure im part of a small number of people with a 3d printer that big lol
nice concept. its starting to get hard finding decent priced sas adapters , cables and adaptors so i prefer use those soon to become rare adapters for plot storage managment, and go with server grade nvmes with lower write speeds but high endurance
Next Video: What If I told you... That you can plot on a Floppy Disk.
oh man that is genius.
🤣🤣🤣💀💀 now Im wondering if that's really possible 🤔🤔😂
I'd love to see a video about your earnings from your setups - very interested in trying this out myself...
The company I work for has boxes of these 300GB SAS drives doing nothing, with many more still in powered off servers in racks. They really are garbage to throw away. After we virtualized our bare metal servers, the servers ended up being decommissioned and stored away in a junk pile at a remote location. We scrapped the hard drives, memory modules and PCIe cards to keep in the office just in case we might need them for something. We also have a good bit of spare SAS HBAs that are no longer in use.
Many enterprise variants on eBay with pre-populated drives and psu's. (NetApp DS2246, Dell MD3220, etc) just make sure you get the right sas cable from your HBA to connect them. Typically you can get the whole shelf (24 drives) for an average of $16/drive (600Gb 10k SAS). No need to mess around with external PSU's, jumper plugs or 3d-printed drive holders.
Bro, congrats! Great informative channel ...but damn those parts selling fast. Good for you tho, keep up good work.
*I have no idea what I'm doing, that's gonna be my first side hassle based 100% on youtube channels.
Thank you so much for your positive comment :) its this kind of stuff that makes me keep going.
Hey! This is awesome!! 2 questions, 15k drive is better than 10k drive? And on the other side, may i use this model? I can get it cheap in my country : Lsi 9260-8 6gb 8 Port Sas 512mb Cache Raid 0 1 5 6
Just picked up a t5600, some RAM, 8 10k drives, 2 e5-2690s, an hba, a 16tb HD through your channel links... I think all I need is some heat gel for the chip swap and I'm good to go. Should be a fun adventure
Oh yeah and 2 breakout cables as well for the drives
Looks like I need to buy Sata breakout cables to connect the drives to a power supply? Do I need to get fans, and external enclosure and an external power supply to do this 10k method? Is that implied??
Thank you so much for the videos, they have been incredibly helpful!
Quick question, I just bought a bunch of Western Digital 300GB 10K 2.5" SAS 6Gb/s WD3001BKHG off eBay for extremely cheap and I just noticed that they have a cache size of 32 mb while a lot of the drives you have recommended in your description are 64 mb. Is this going to be a problem if I want to replicate your build? Thanks so much for your time :)
Did you ever figure the cache out? I'm curious too!
Now I see this video haha. Just bought NVMEs to plot and 100% would've went the SAS route if I had seen this sooner
Love your mindset my guy thank you for sharing!
great video. I've been wondering about this exact setup with fast SAS drives in raid 0. Seems like a great scalable solution to plotting endurance.
Great content, could you please show the rig and also a video on how to assemble the drives.
I enjoyed your content and subscribed!
P.S. You might want to change your camera settings a bit because it was focused on your shoulders but your face was blurry.
Great Video, great content! I found some 15k SAS server harddrives really cheap. Now I was wondering, do they fit in a desktop computer with any SAS PCIe card or do I have to check if the controller supports those drives specifically? What's your experience?
SAS drives should work with any SAS raid controller or HBA card. The only possible issue that comes to my mind is that some controllers (like b110i and b120i on HP servers) support only SATA drives, despite using SAS interface, so you do need to verify that your card supports SAS drives
You can get a used server such as a Dell R720XD SFF 24 bay dual socket Xeon CPU starting around $600 on eBay. They usually come with HBAs or Raid controllers such as the PERC H710. Not bad for a plotting system using inexpensive 2.5" 10K SAS drives. I have an R720XD 16 bay I used for my VSAN lab for several years.
Very interesting. Gonna look into it. Thanks for the info
If I use 10x 600gb of these, would it be much slower since it’s only 10 of them writing at the same time compare to 20 of the 300gb 🤔
idk but i just ordered 6....
Amazing video, specially making chia greener with re use of SAS drives, great recommendation. I wish i could have it elsewhere, simply the noise would be a deal breaker for me.
Great content as usual! I have 2 older desktops I was going to get rid of! Double core 4 threads I3s ...would you repurpose them to mine Chia? And was is the best way to plot using multiple rigs?
Very ...very interesting! I will look into making a spare plotting computer with dual cpus for a future chia build. Why not save the world from more garbage by using it to make money lol 👍 Great tips Sloth much appreciated.
Awesome content as always, thanks for sharing man! Quick question, is it possible to use SAS drivers in a desktop PC?
Yes, absolutely
@@SlothTechTV Nice, then "LSI 9211-8i P20 IT Mode for ZFS FreeNAS unRAID 6Gbps SAS HBA" should work like a charm, right? Do I have to look or "unRAID" adapters?
As long as you use them with controller card (raid or hba) that supports sas, you can use them in any computer with a free pcie slot
As a Canadian, I'm so envious of your pricing and availability.
Yeah. This isn't really an option for us. Also if you're a casual like I am (20tb max on a 2600x) and plan on using your nVME drive for your new PC build later on (CPU's are starting to become readily available now with price drops coming sooner rather than later), then your nVME drives will be fine.
I just got a lot of 10 HP 15K used SAS drives on Ebay for US $170 (shipping and customs included).
just bought a hp proliant server for plotting !!! 40 bucks from canada !!!
@Free TV found it on ebay !
I have been watching and re-watching most of your videos and I have learned so much that I have been placing orders and setting up a workspace to give this a go. Your videos are fantastic and informative so please keep them coming. Thanks you for the links since it is a way that we can help support the channel and get linked to just the products that you are discussing!! Here are a few questions that I have been collecting across the videos that I can't quite answer:
What mods have you done to your Creality 3D Printer?
I'll be using the LSI SAS9200-16e in a T7910 connected to the HP 487738-001 24 Bay SAS mounted on a PCIE riser attached to the server box.
What additional cables are you using to power the 24 drives running from the SF600 that don't come included with the power supply? (Power splitter cables?)
Are you plugged into the 2 - 6PIN Peripheral/SATA power ports on the SF600?
Could you show a picture of the wiring harness side of the power supply?
Where does the printed power plug Female that you have mounted to the Farm Box go to?
I know you say to lay down 6 to 7 layers fill for the base in the 3D pint your own server video .. I was wondering if you laid down several layers from a black spool first and then switched spools and printed in the white?
Is this black layer in the Thingiverse files or do I just pause the job and switch spools? (3D printing is new to me - I bought the CR10 S4)
excellent video! I have two questions that I would like you to shed some light. Q1. would 15k drive be better in performance than the 10k drive? Q2. should I RAID0 them together or run these disks individually? Thanks!
Noticed that the PCI slots in the T5810s are rated at different wattages. Any concern with which slot is needed to power the expander cards?
Just to be clear... it isn't power but PCI lanes... but the reality is that if you have a card that fits the slots you are going to be fine
Great idea and you can find lots of them on Ebay tested for >10 each but not really Energy efficient. 7-8 Watts each at higher loads x10 is 70-80 watts not counting the power supply and boards compared 2 watts or so for a 2TB GEN 3 speed NVMe to replace the 16TB’s I’m using on each PC would add about 80x8= 640 watts. 4 PC’s 2560 extra Watts.
Thank you for making these wonderful videos and share your own experience. I really do appreciate it. May I ask you a question regarding the SAS 10k drive that you mentioned, please?
Can the 24 of Netapp DS2246 600GB 10K SAS HDD, be used to make one like you?
Thank you for your reply. have a great day :)
Fantastic info.
Do you have some info about plot in a not-so-new processor? something like old FX´s or Pentium G´s?
"Thanks boss. Your constantly droning voice woke me up from a nice dream. Thanks a lot " says the dog as he walks disgustingly away.
I'm not sure if I am adding it up correctly but it looks like the 40plot/day system would cost well north of $2k. For that amount you could build 2 10700 systems that do a total of 50 plots per day and have enough left over for a spare NVME...
Can you make a video on how you put them together?
Just as I suspected. Good video.
This is cool bro, thanks for the information
Hello. Your video is just amazing. Thanks a lot. I will start to search this hdd. So technically if I can find 15 k is even better
I had to watch this a few times, it wasn't made clear that you are doing a software RAID 0 with these drives in linux but makes perfect sense
It's not a software raid 0 it's just one drive one plot
Is it better to use 2.5 or 3.5 SAS drives? In my humble opinion, at equivalent rotational speed the 2.5 sas drives consume less electricity, but maybe the 3.5s go faster. You are talking about an LSI 9210 but could a card like this HP SMART H240 SAS controllers work? Thanks Sloth Tech TV for your great job. Keep Up the good work. Thanks man !
The duplex difference between sata and sas is really a very minor difference. In reality, a spinning disk can only either read or write at once. The benefit of full duplex is that the SAS drive has a bigger queue, and also can store more "pending" requests as they also have bigger queues (SAS has queue depth of 254 vs SATA queue depth of 32). But again, even this difference is fairly minor. I see plot times of between 35k and 45k seconds on 15k sas w/ 128MB cache , and I see 36k to 48k on my 7200RPM enterprise SATA. Under full CPU load, the difference is negligible. That said, I definitely use 10k/15k SAS because they are dirt cheap, as you point out =D Though of course there is a power draw difference (ie 4 SAS vs 1 NVME drive).
You need to factor in the external chassis that will hold these drives. These do not come cheap. Yes, enormous Supermicro JBOD cases can be had for $300-$400 but these are super bulky and loud and they will need another $300ish to connect them to the main unit and quieten them down plus 2 HBA adapters, one for the main server and one for the chassis etc. The whole set-up is not exactly cheap. A desktop/tower SAS 8 bay unit could cost anything from $200 (if you are lucky) to $1,000-$2,000 depending on the manufacturer. For NVMe I bought myself 2 x 2 TB 3,300 TBW drives for 220 euros each. Maybe I was lucky to buy them early enough (1-2 weeks ago). For 1 TBW per plot these are good for approximately 6,000 plots or 600TB worth of plot files.
I have been doing this on my old system. I have 12 300G 10K SAS 2.5 drives all chugging.
I already filled up my NAS with 18TB of plots and now need to figure out how to store more.
and remember kids, firecuda 520 and corsair mp600, recommended by the chia dev team, is like taking your hard earned money and tossing it in the trash, thanks chia dev team, I love 500 mb/s writes for a gen 4.0 nvme drive!
It is true that the old traditional HDD drives can be written and rewritten more times in comparison with SSD drives.
On the other hand, HDD drives have a higher rate of failures and data errors due to the fact that they are constructed out f movable parts.
Man thank you so much for this video, I was looking for ssd drives for plotting but I was worried about their endurance but I see that sas drives in my country are on the same price or even more expensive, plus the connector you think that their price has started to climb?
Seth Estrada has a great video about why you shouldn’t mine chia as it’s too late for most common plebs like us. The time it would take to realize a profit is growing exponentially and you’d be risking your ROI on pure luck.
Thanks for the great content. I have a question tho, is ok to get bigger size SAS Drives let’s say 10 or 15k rpm but about 1.2TB or 2.4TB? Cheers
I just purchased 2x 450 15k SAS drives + 2x 600GB 15k SAS drives used all four for 40$ lol. A simple SAS HBA for 120$ new and a SFF8082 cable to 4x SFF8482 for 20$, should make for a fun little plotting project.
Great video. Is the 1 plot per drive a capacity bottleneck or a throughput one? I ask because i'm looking on ebay and finding 900GB equivalents that are only a few dollars more on avg and that would help inform a buying decision.
But how many HDDs can I put into the Dell T5610 E5-2637 V2 without 3D printing a new case and buy an additional power supply?
You can also buy the Dell 900GB 10K SAS Savvio enterprise 2.5" drives for around $30 on eBay. Much better value per GB.
Thank you so much for doing these videos! Are you only mining chia on windows? Can it be mined in Linux?
Yes on Linux too, it's 10% faster on Linux.
I watched the other videos, but have a lack of understanding on how to power these! A separate power supply is used I take it, but is there special cables from the power supply to the drives? I ordered the drives and the cables from your link but I don’t wanna have to receive them and then figure out I can’t power them up.
i made a separate video about powering the drives -- you do need an external power supply, and those sata power breakout cables linked in the video description.
@@SlothTechTV I bought the SAS drives, the HBA and the cables from your link. But the more I research It, It appears they are powered from the Card? I can't figure out why I need another power supply, or how to hook it up. I've watched all your recent videos "And am thankful for them" but can't find where this is covered.
Absolutely awesome information, thank you!👍
Could you test how fast a 15k drive is compered to 10k? I just bought 8x10k drives for 11€ each but I'm wondering if a 15k is better.
im about to buy some 1.2tb sas 10k for 60 usd. After everyone knows about this the price will go to the moon
Hey Sloth! 😁 I learned something today, trying to plot to two sata hdd's. In my case atleast it does not work.
Cause when disc 1 works 100%, disc 2 goes to 0%, then disc 1 goes down to 0% and disc 2 goes up.. So only one of them can work 100%, they cant do that together.. For some reason.
Can you confirm this is not a problem with the controller and SAS discs? Im about to buy some stuff.. But i dont wanna buy if this is the case.. 😜 I love the idea of using SAS disc's, its much cooler then SSD's i think.. Thats why i use one of my 70gb VelociRaptor disc's for Windows on my plotting machine.. 😁
Love your content about chia, really good stuff! 👍
Great video! I have a question regarding the hba card. Why do you want it to be on IT mode? wouldn't you want to put these 8 x 300GB drives on Raid 0 to gain R/W speed? IT mode will set the card to pass through without no raid
I thought that too at first.. surprisingly its actually faster to just plot against them individually..
Putting drives in raid 0 should get them to work faster than one individual drive, but slower than the sum of their individual performances. There is a performance penalty for maintaining raid configuration
@@SlothTechTV can you please share your Swarm config for this setup?
Man you are great but the dog is epic 🍻
She says thank you for acknowledging that she really MAKES this channel what it is.
I would agree.