My Chia Story from 2021
This is to document my Chia journey and what I’ve learned along the way from day one to help others who may want to do the same.
The Early Days
I was relaxing at the beach in Southern California one day in early March 2021 and one of my friends’ PM’ed me about this new cryptocurrency project called Chia that he knew about from one of his friends who was part of the Chia development team. Chia was very early and had not yet launched Mainnet. I was already familiar with Ethereum mining, and this was a very new and novel way for a blockchain to operate (PoST). It had me intrigued right out of the gate.
As soon as I got home, I downloaded the GUI and started plotting with the OG plotter on a laptop (Intel i7 with 1tb SSD). I was moving plots to an attached external hard drive by Western Digital. Not satisfied with the speed of my progress, I then did the same thing 20x, on 20 different laptops and hard drives. I was remoting via Google Chrome Desktop. Plots were starting to pile up fast, and I had not thought through how to manage this quickly growing farm.
The NAS Failure around Mainnet Launch
I bought 12-bay NAS devices from Synology and started moving my plots there. However, the NAS was having issues with lookup times when a harvester was accessing the plots on these NASes -- I needed a better solution. I was never able to figure out how to get Chia running in a Docker image, as some others have done with this NAS.
It was around this time, March 17, 2021, that mainnet launched. As soon as it launched I had enough plots in my farm to win 2 XCH every 12 hours. I was able to farm 120 XCH in the first few weeks. But then the big day came where the XCH Chia coin became tradable & transferable around mid-April 2021, and the netspace almost immediately exploded because at launch the XCH coin price was trading around $1,600 per coin on foreign exchanges. I never sold any during this time, as I was unsure of the legality, and of the security, of doing so on these non-US exchanges.
The frenzy began and my HDD hoarding along with the rest of the world, driving HDD prices almost 2x from normal retail prices. Around this time I thought it would be prudent to diversify my investing and buy some stock in Seagate and Western Digital. When external drives were cheaper than naked HDDs, I would buy the externals and “shuck them” (remove the inner hard drive from the casing). Best Buy had 12TB drives for $199 and Costco had 8TB drives for as low as $119.
Speaking of Costco, I had a slight issue with my membership during this time. I had purchased so many of their 8TB Seagate drives that they put a ban on my ability to purchase anything else at any store from the Corporate level. I had to speak to management to have my account reinstated. They told me I had been flagged for exceeding the 3-drive purchase limit.
As you can see in the photo to the left, I filled a Tesla Model S full of drives in one day. Drives were very hard to get around this time so I had to maximize my opportunity to pounce.
The Move to DAS at Scale
After my NAS lag/latency became concerning (I did not want to lose a win that could cost me $3,000 each time!), then I started buying 5-bay USB-C direct-attached devices by Sabrent that would daisy-chain up to five devices (25 discs per USB port). The problem here is that none of my machines would accept more than about 8 of these enclosures, and I had about 30 of these enclosures. I knew it was time then to level-up to enterprise-grade level hardware because I did not want to juggle a dozen separate harvesters.
I considered the SuperMicro JBODs on the secondary market but it appeared that the manufacturer stopped supporting the devices. They were also hard to get at scale. Then I came across Sans Digital 24-bay JBODs on Amazon and bought one with a mini-SAS card to try it out for $3,300.
Finally, I found something that just worked! I had a Dell XPS tower from Costco that had room for the mini-SAS card (after removing the RTX 3070 GPU to be placed in a separate ETH mining rig). I installed Ubuntu Desktop, installed the mini-SAS drivers from Sans Digital (thanks to their customer support for providing me with Linux drivers), installed Chia, and started farming the direct-attached plots on my JBOD. Each final plot disk was formatted in NTFS just in case I ever wanted to farm on a Windows machine.
It was right around this time that plotting started to accelerate quickly due to the great work of MadMax and BladeBit. In the OG days, plots would take anywhere from 6-12 HOURS to finish a K=32 plot. But my MadMax plotters had 128gb of RAM and Ryzen 5900x CPUs and were finishing K=32 plots in about 20 minutes. BladeBit was running on 64-core Threadrippers with 512GB of DRAM and cranking out a plot every 6 minutes (which is faster than I could transfer the plot over USB-C)! Each stand-alone plotter was plotting to NTFS formatted HDDs connected via USB-C Sabrents (repurposed after what was discussed above). Each plotter was built from parts I found myself on Amazon and Newegg.
Then I started buying more JBODs. Without the mini-SAS card, the enclosures are about $2,000 and they will daisy chain up to 128 disks. Once I had filled up 128 disks, I used another Dell XPS to be a remote harvester for my next 128 disks.
Each 42u rack by Tripp-Lite (~$1,300) will hold approximately 240 disks which is a perfect balance for two harvesters per rack. The 30amp, 208v UPS by Tripp lite takes up 4u of space in the rack and will power two full racks of disks.
Fast forward to where we are today, November 8, 2021. I just completed filling up my second 42-u rack. This will bring me up to a 6 PiB farm (6,000 TiB). There are approximately 460 disks contained in these two racks with a combined weight of about 3,000 pounds. They are sitting on a concrete basement foundation floor and with 2 plotters plotting, four farmers farming, consuming 13A of power at 208v.
To the Present and Future
My Chia journey is far from over. It’s really just getting started. I have goals to reach 20 PiB. I’m in the farming business for the long-haul – not as a get-rich-quick scheme. I believe in the Chia project, its leadership team, its vision for the future of greener blockchain technology. I’ve thrown down a lot of cash in this investment, and hope to see it succeed. But hey, worst case scenario, I have built quite the data-center and I am proud of it.