by The goal I wanted to accomplish with this rebuild, was to reduce the number of computers farming Chia. While retaining the hard drive being used. Doing so will reduce energy consumed and the space taken in my workroom.
Rebuilding The Farmer
My old farmer computer was a big old workstation and quite the power-hungry beast too. Plus the darn thing didn’t have much for installing extra storage. I wanted something smaller and have much more storage capacity.
With that in mind, I went with a Fractal Design Node 804, not only was it small but had eight 3.5″ drive slots. I went with a GIGABYTE B450M DS3H Motherboard, it had 4 slots for ram, m.2 slots, and two PCIe 16 slots. The latter being important since I need them for installing the drive controllers.
I installed an AMD Ryzen 3200g APU with 16Gb of Memory. Not much CPU performance is needed for Chia Farming so an APU is more than good enough for the task. The Power supply I used was a 1000w EVGA SuperNOVA this should help a lot for supporting more drives. But it will also improve power efficiency. The drive controllers are Dell Perc H310, both of which were flash to the IT firmware.
During this rebuild, I took all my largest size drives from my Harvesters and place them in my new farmer. This meant that there were thirteen 8TB drives and two 10TB for a total of 114TB of Drive space.
Farmer Rebuild
CPU: AMD Ryzen 3200g
RAM: 16GB DDR4-3200
Motherboard: GIGABYTE B450M DS3H
Drive Contoller: 2 x Perc H310
Storage: 114TB Across 14 Hard Drives
Case: Fractal Design Node 804
Power Supply: 1000w EVGA SuperNOVA
Harvester Rebuild
I decommission one Harvester since I manage to fit all the drives to one machine. The great thing about this Harvester is it’s better equip than the farmer. it has a better motherboard, CPU, and more ram. I attach all the SSD’s I use for making plots onto this Harvester. So the farmer can be focused on testing challenges than making plots. Improving my chances of getting a block reward.
Harvester Rebuild specs
CPU: Intel i7-8700k
RAM: 32GB DDR 4 DDR4-3200
Motherboard: Gigabyte Z370 AORUS Gaming 7
Two SSD for Plotting: Samsung 970 Pro 1TB and Samsung 860 Pro 1Tb
Drive Contoller: Perc H310
Storage: a total of 64TB across 16 Drives
Power Supply: EVGA SuperNova 750W
My Chia Farming Setup
With this rebuild, I manage to reduce my power consumption by at least half and got it down to two computers. Plus I can finally have my main computer back, after using it to help speed up my Chia plotting. I do want to replace the Harvester case, with the same one from my Farmer. But I already over-extended my spending on this project. If interest in Chia happens again, I might expand. until then I’ll let it continue what I got now.
If you want to learn more about Chia read my previous post about my old Chia setup here
