Tag Archives: nvme

Building the Intel NUC Chia Plotter

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In an earlier post, I shared a design for a Chia plotter/farmer based around the Intel NUC NUC10i7FNH tiny computer.

Today I built that machine, and it’s running its first plot as I type this.

If you landed here, you might be interested in my other recent Chia posts:

Pricing disclaimer: All prices, availability info, and links are accurate as of the writing of this article (May 3, 2021) unless otherwise noted. Prices vary from day to day and availability does too. Use this info with a grain of salt especially if you are reading this in 2022 or beyond.

Here’s a quick rundown of what was involved in the process.

Shopping List

Feel free to shop in your preferred venues online or locally, or if you already have components, use them. These links are Amazon affiliate links, and if you use them, I get a few bucks to go toward my next hardware adventure. (I bought my NUC and RAM from Central Computer, a local computer store in Silicon Valley, and the NVMe drive came from Amazon.)

Base computer – NUC10i7FNH1 currently $570 at Amazon. You want the i7, and you want the FNH which is the “high” case that holds a 2.5″ drive as well as the m.2.

RAM – 32GB (2x16GB) DDR4 2666 or better SODIMM. Crucial 16GBx2 kit around $182 at Amazon. You can install 64GB, but you probably don’t need it with this processor.

Boot drive – I used a Samsung PM851 that’s not available on Amazon at the moment. Any 2.5″ SATA drive will do, even a HDD. Amazon has the WD Blue SSD 250GB for $45 or 500GB for $60. If you have something else on hand that’s at least 120GB, go ahead and use it, or if you want some internal plot storage, get something bigger. 

Plotting drive – 2TB Inland Premium NVMe is popular with its 3200TBW rating, about $240 on Amazon but out of stock for the next week. If you watch your drive life, you can use cheaper NVMe or even SATA m.2 storage. But check the TBW (Total Bytes Written, or Terabytes Written) and warranty for your drive and take that into account. 

OS install drive – Get a USB 3.0 drive with 16GB or more space, and use Balena Etcher or Rufus to burn Ubuntu 20.04 LTS to it.I like the Sandisk Ultra 32GB for price point and quality, about $10 at Amazon. 

External long-term plot/farm storage – I’ll be using an 8TB external drive in the near term, but you can use whatever you have, even NAS storage. 

Bonus: Staging disk. A user on r/chia suggested using a staging drive to copy your final plot file to, so that your plot process ends faster than if it has to be copied to slow disk. You can then automate moving the plot files to your external HDD at your leisure, and get back to plotting again up to an hour faster. For this, you can use an external USB 3.0 or better SSD like the WD My Passport SSD ($150 for 1TB), Crucial X8 ($148 for 1TB), or pretty much any SSD that will hold a batch of your plots (1TB will hold 9 plot files). You can also use a directory on your NVMe drive for this, but make sure you don’t let it fill up.

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A (Dell) Precision replacement for our Intel NUC desktop

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I didn’t really expect to be writing another build report so soon for my primary desktop. But in October of this year, it seemed to be time for a hardware revamping for my primary home desktop.

About five months ago, I built a 7th generation core i7 Intel NUC with Optane technology to replace an older 3rd generation desktop. That system ran a dual-core, quad-thread i7 processor, 32GB of DDR4 laptop memory, a 32GB Optane drive, and a 2TB solid state hybrid drive (SSHD).

Well, after three months I still felt the pain of a dual core system more than I’d expected. And in the meantime, my brother sent me a barebones Dell Precision Tower 7910 as an early birthday present. I was a bit concerned about it at first, since it uses Xeon v4 processors and DDR4 ECC registered memory, neither of which is inexpensive. The 1300 watt power supply had me concerned as well.

I decided it would be worth rebuilding the system anyway, since I could easily sell the system if I chose not to use it, and it’d be fun to run a more modern workstation for a while if I did decide to sell it. Spoiler: I am not planning to sell, but I’ll share the build report here so you can think about the options in case this meets your needs.

T7910 2018-12-04 16.07.19

Dell Precision 7910, pictured beneath the Intel NUC desktop we built out this summer. 1U power distribution unit and 1U security appliance below for scale. Sorry, no banana.

Curious Caveat

I had written most of this post, but when I went to confirm pricing, I realized that I’m running non-registered, non-ECC RAM in this system. Despite the documentation saying UDIMMs are not supported, and Crucial’s compatibility list showing all ECC Registered RAM, the parts I’m using are unbuffered non-ECC non-registered DDR4.

This may not be an optimal configuration, but if the cost and availability work better for you, it may be worth a try. Note that you will almost certainly be unable to mix registered and unregistered DIMMs, and you won’t be able to mix LRDIMMs and regular RDIMMS.

Update [2019-07-09]: I’ve noticed that the system has been sluggish, acting like it was swapping things out to disk even though I was only using about half of the total 32GB of RAM. Flashbacks to bad Solaris configurations in 2004. I replaced the unsupported memory described above with a set of four PC4-1700R Registered ECC DDR4 RDIMMs, and so far with a little bit of use it’s back to what I’d expect from a 28-core system with plenty of memory. Still using nearly half the RAM, with Chrome alone taking 6GB, but it’s snappy and not painful to use.

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