Configure storage pool under Windows of chia mining machine to improve P disk speed

Recently, there is a very popular blockchain mining project on the Internet, CHIA mining. Currently, the price of hard drives on the entire network has increased, and the quantity is in short supply. Based on the current price of CHIA tokens and xch coins, the return on investment is very generous. Many foreign second-hand, has become popular in the domestic market, especially large-slot servers. Prices are also soaring. Here’s how to transform a second-hand server into a Chia mining machine.

Chia miner configuration

The server is installed as server 2016 system, system after installationand Windows updates

Windows server 2016 system activation reference:Windows Server 2016 Datacenter KEY Data Center Edition Activation

Server systems can also have higher Windows versions installed. This article takes Windows Server 2016 as an example.

Windows更新

After the system is updated, open Server Manager and click File and Storage Services.

Click Disk Options and all hard drives will be displayed in the status bar on the right.

Right-click and go online to bring all offline disks online. During the online process, a window that requires formatting may pop up, just click Cancel.

Then click Reset Disk.

After resetting the disk, the partition format is displayed as unknown. The disk needs to be initialized here.

The process is to bring the disk online, reset the disk, initialize the disk, and do this in sequence for the existing disk.

Then download the CrystalDiskInfo disk tool to check the current disk health.Click to download CrystalDiskInfo

Download CrystalDiskMark8 to test system disk writing,CrystalDiskMark8Instructions.

Check the server array card model in Device Manager.

This is an older server, and the current configuration is sufficient for mining. Chia mining itself does not consume too many system resources. The server can light up. Mainly extra large storage is key.

I searched for the latest driver of sas3 3008 on the Internet. The current driver version is 2.51.12.80, and the latest version online is 2.51.21.0.sas3 3008 driver download , scroll the page to the bottom, click Agerr, download the driver and update it.

Click Browse my computer for driver software, and then copy the downloaded driver, select the folder where the driver is located and update it. The server needs to be restarted after driver update.

After restarting, start configuring the hard drive, click on the storage pool in the server manager just now.

Fill in the name of the storage pool you want to create, such as chia, and then in the next step, select the disk you want to add to the storage pool.

Then click Create.

After creation is complete, click Close.

Select the storage pool that has been created, right-click and create a new virtual disk.

Select the name of the storage pool where you want to create a virtual disk and click OK to enter the virtual disk creation page.

Give the virtual disk to be created a name, such as chia. Then the next step is to come to the storage data layout options.

There are three options in the storage data layout options, simple, mirror, and parity.

What are the best uses of simple, mirror, and parity?

Storage space provides simple space, mirror space and parity space, each with unique characteristics.

  • Simple space design is used to increase performance but resilience is not critical. They are best suited for temporary data such as video files being rendered, temporary files for image editors, and intermediate compiler object files. Simple space requires at least one physical disk.
  • Mirror spaces are designed to increase performance and increase resiliency. A two-way mirror space can tolerate one disk failure, and a three-way mirror space can tolerate two disk failures. They are ideal for all kinds of data storage, from general file sharing to VHD libraries. Windows provides automatic maintenance of data integrity when the mirror space is formatted as a Resilient File System (ReFS). This is a layer of resilience that goes beyond a resilient implementation that maintains multiple copies of data to tolerate drive failures. This storage design requires at least two hard drives to protect you from a single hard drive failure, or at least five disks to protect you from two hard drive failures simultaneously.
  • Parity space is designed to increase capacity utilization and increase resiliency. Parity space is ideal for archival data and streaming media such as music and video. This storage design requires at least three drives to protect you from a single drive failure, or at least seven disks to protect you from two drives failing simultaneously.

Specify the setting type, select Fixed, and then specify the virtual disk size in the next step.

Specify the virtual disk size After selecting the maximum size, click Next to create the virtual disk. Click the Close button when finished.

After creating the virtual disk, a menu will automatically pop up to create a volume label for the virtual disk. Click Next and select the virtual disk you just created.

Specify the volume size, which is the default, drive letter or folder, which is the default next step, and file system settings, which are the default next step. Then click Create.

At this time, the virtual disk D drive has been created successfully.

Check the current disk status in Disk Management of Computer Management. Prepare to perform read and write tests on the virtual disk.

Let’s take a look at the 7200 rpm SATA single disk read and write test.

After making 9 SATA hard disks into a storage pool, take a look at the read and write speeds.

Test the read and write speeds of 6 SATA hard drives made into a storage pool.

Test the read and write speed after 5 pieces of SATA are made into a storage pool.

Open the Task Manager to view the real-time monitoring of hard disk reading and writing. Since Windows Server 2016 does not enable disk monitoring by default in the Task Manager, you need to manually enable it here.

Open the command prompt as an administrator and enter: diskperf -y

Then open the task manager and you can view the real-time read and write data of the disk.

Next visit chia’s official website to download, chia fullwallet for mining.

For detailed mining tutorials, please visit:Chia/xch mining tutorial, Windows mining machine P disk configuration

Chia (Chia) official website https://www.chia.net

accessChia project address to download the latest version of the wallet:https://github.com/Chia-Network/chia-blockchain/releases

Click windows to download the latest version of chia full node wallet. The latest version is 1.1.5.

After setting up the wallet, you can start mining on the P disk. The Chia Miner Windows configuration comes to an end here. The server configuration in this article is slightly lower and the hard disk is relatively small. It is mainly used for testing. The official mining configuration is higher than this. It is recommended to use a 16T hard disk size. It is recommended to use an SDD hard disk with the NVMe protocol for the P disk cache.

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