Well, I’d say either or even a combination of both. What's the MVP - minimum viable product for Chia farming?
Use what you have
Assuming you have a computer - laptop, desktop (Windows; Mac or Linux) and say one modest 500GB external* hard drive or perhaps two external* hard drives, say one bigger 320GB and one 120GB or 240GB - what could you do with this kind of set up?
One drive
Assign both the Temporary Directory (work space) and the Final Directory (plot storage) to this one external drive, you need the Temporary Directory space for the plot creation and then space to store the finished plot.
You should be able to create two plots (go through the process twice). Each plot is around 109GB. So I’d say a 500GB drive is the minimum.
The Chia GUI recommends you use a fast SSD, an MVMe would be the optimum, but you don't have to - it will work with a normal HDD spinning disk drive, but will just be much slower (maybe taking half as long, over twelve hours).
Two drives
Use one drive for the Temporary Directory space and the other for the Final Directory plot storage. In the 320GB + one 120GB or 240GB scenario, the bigger drive is the temp storage (Chia needs 256.6 GB for temporary , the smaller is for the 108.8GB plot [you can only get one plot on a 120GB drive].
What about your computers internal drive - how about use that for temp space?
Well you could, especially if you are only going to be plotting once or twice. It will really slow your machine down, take a long, long time and you’ll be inflicting a lot of wear and tear on the drive with your previous data and OS. If with your machine it isn’t easy to replace say a failed hard drive, I really don’t think it’s a good idea.
Invest money
So you could go from making a custom Chia rig (basically a self-build computer) to strategically investing here and there.
The latter is my strategy.
Here’s what I did / I could afford:
- external MVMe and case - makes plotting much faster, ideally a 1TB or 2TB but I got a 500GB Samsung one
- Powered USB 3 hub (I've been using 2.5" drives I had spare lying around as Plot storage)
- Considering getting up to 10TB external drive (maybe WD MyBook)
Practical tips
- when plotting make sure your computer doesn't power down or update, and the Temporary Directory disk remains connected and also active - any issues here you will lose the entire plot (it is a temporary file after all).
- sometimes the process finishes (Status 100%) but never switches to Farming - DON'T PANIC if the plot temp file is in your Temporary Directory space you can just manual transfer to the target Final Directory drive (this happens say if your assigned drive doesn't have enough space - you can just move to another drive or it might be just a hiccup) you just change the file ending to .plot rather than .plot.2.temp for example.
- when Adding a Plot there are two options Plot in Parallel and Add Plot to Queue; if you choose the former it is best to use Advanced Options and stagger the starts of the plotting by say one or two hours - I tried it with just ten minutes which meant the two plotting activities went really slow, plotting has various cycles of intensity so if you stagger the activities don't clash.
- it's a good idea to do it overnight or during a period you don't need to use your computer
- I would advise against using your internal drive with the OS (be it HDD or SSD) unless that is a junk computer or it would be easy to swap out a dead drive and reinstall.
Pools
So the rumor is May 17th, Chia will issue an update to allow 'pool-able plots'.
For me this is the biggie. By joining a pool, it won't matter that you just have one plot or ten plots or even one hundred plots compared to the current situation of 'whales' taking all the rewards, leaving nothing for the little guys like us.
These plots that can be pooled will create a kind of Year Zero reset on May 17th whereby the faster you can re-plot the faster you can join the pool. There is also a decision - keep the solo plots* already made or start over and switch all your storage to the pool-able plots. Not sure there. Maybe keep the *lottery tickets?
So perhaps you should wait for May 17th?
Well it might be worth getting the process of plotting and farming (solo) down so that you will know what to do May 17th, just to make sure everything works. You could also think about drives you have around; delete some files, consolidate data on to one disk, maybe even buy some cheap secondhand drives.
Resources
Chia farming is a hot, hot ???? topic right now, so along with the Chia.net site, there are numerous YouTubers outputting excellent content, Caleb at Coin Breakthrough is my favorite!
Any questions?
I don't claim to be an expert, but I have got a modest number of plots farming (no XCH yet) and I have used just gear I already had (with the exception of the MVMe drive which I think is a good investment for speedy plotting, so if I can help hit me up in the comments.
Thumbnail photo by Vincent Botta on Unsplash