And again I broke my word and didn't publish a new article yesterday. This time, however, not without a reason and you will also find out why. This will also be the last part of this story.
After my recent successes, I was both desperate and angry at myself. I had blindly relied on guides on the Internet and threw money out the window. Now, however, I'm an ambitious person by heart and still have a thing for destiny. So giving up was not an option.
After a lot of tests, really a lot, I realized. Either I bought the worst NVME hard drive on the planet or it is simply defective. I can't say for sure what is true, this hard drive definitely went down. It was a Crucial P2 CT2000P2SSD8 with 2TB.
In my tests it turned out that my old Crucial MX500 SSD is simply faster than the NVME. Good job!
I now own a Sabrent Rocket Q with 2TB and it does exactly what it's supposed to do. Now I've found the perfect settings for myself.
The CPU runs on all 6 cores with 3.9 GHZ and it is absolutely stable. I have a total of 6 plots running (5 on the new Sabrent, 1 on the old MX500) with the following settings
4 threads, 4.6 GiB working memory and with activated bitfield plotting.
I started these with a one-hour break. Since the Windows GUI does not support time-shifted starting, I had to start a new plot for a total of 6 hours, but with several repetitions. So I don't have to worry about anything anymore and the PC just plots.
So I get about 12 plots per day, one plot takes about 12 hours. Still a long way from the values given in the NUC Guide, but good enough for me ... and I just don't feel like it anymore!
As already mentioned, a new version of the GUI has been published in the meantime. To what extent this is actually faster, I cannot say, because I did not have a constant and functioning workflow before the update.
Meanwhile my external 12TB hard drive is almost full and I own 10 Chia. Another 12TB hard drive will arrive tomorrow, I will also fill this with plots and then it's over for me. Over 20TB of plots and an investment of over 600 € should be enough.
At the beginning of May, transactions and trading in chia will be released, maybe I'll publish another post then. We will see.
But now to the main reasons why I will no longer continue this blog. I just don't want to pay any more attention to Chia. Yes, this blog didn't get a lot of attention, but it's just about the principle. Nevertheless, I of course leave everything online, both for myself as a memory and for everyone who will discover Chia at a later point in time. I am curious where the journey will go.
Why do I not want to pay any more attention to Chia?
Quite simply, it is absolutely not appreciated. When I published the first article back then, I signed up for Keybase. Keybase is something like Discord for "the cool Kids" and their platform of choice for “support”. That's where I posted the link to my article. One of the "great" Chia personalities wrote a post above and below me. He didn't appreciate my contribution. I wasn't even worth this “Chia Smiley” to him. I have to admit, that was my first setback. You'd think that putting in some time would be respected. Thought wrong.
It was yesterday that I discovered a big bug in the software. Suddenly the GUI lost its connection to the mainnet. My PC has been running for several days without any problems, my internet connection was absolutely stable and nothing else has changed for me.
I couldn't restart my PC because plots were still active and I would have lost so much time. Strictly speaking, I was no longer connected to the network for over 9 hours, so I couldn't generate any chia, so I lost “money”.
As an exemplary Internet user, I described my problem in detail and even attached the software's log file. No reaction.
For me it was in the middle of the day, but due to the time difference it was somewhere else in the middle of the night. All right, I am waiting. No reaction.
When I was able to restart my PC and the software in the evening, I wrote another post, again attached a current log file and have not received a useful answer to this day. On the contrary, I got the "suggestion" to restart my PC. So it wasn't even read what I wrote because I mentioned that I had already done so.
Anyone who thinks that they will help you there and that you are thanked to have found a bug and properly documented it, is far from it.
Already when I published my post at Easter, in which I critically observe the development of Chia, I was faced with clear headwinds. But more on that elsewhere.
The good thing is, after another restart, the software started to sync again at some point and the journey continued for me. However, I don't know why it was, whether it will happen again and whether anything will ever change.
I would like to thank everyone who accompanied and followed my trip. I hope you enjoyed it. This blog is considered closed, but I have decided to publish a Chia Report once a week and look at the current statistics of the week with you. Maybe we will see each other there again, I would be happy!
PS: Raspberry Pi. There was something. Basically, it is possible to use an RPI to farm chia without any problems, since hardly any computing power is required for this. However, it is already (well more or less) known that conflicts arise when several Chia instances are running in the same network. You can't find a word about it in Chia's Twitter feed, but you often read something about it on Reddit and in the weird Keybase thing.
In any case, I will only tackle this when both of my hard drives are completely plotted and I can use my PC for other things again.
