To be precise, the process of "plotting" (using disk space for Chia) causes a lot of writes to disks, but those writes are a one-time process. Once a plot is written it can be moved anywhere and farmed forever. The actual proof of space algorithm for farming only takes an initial 5 seeks and then 64 seeks for the full proof so farming is not a big stress on disks long-term.

What numbers are we talking about here? Assuming 1tb ssd with say 1000 cycles of warranty, would it die instantly or would it not even feel it?

I stumbled upon an interview with the actual Chia <s>miner</s> farmer, he claims best SSDs will stay healthy for about a year, and having SSD is a must. Plotting should be done on an SSD (preferably as an NVMe), since this process involves creating 300Gb temp file on the same device that will be used to form a plot. Actual interview [0] is in Russian, but I guess you could get a decent Google Translate-processed English translation . [0] https://habr.com/ru/company/ruvds/blog/554046/

This was really precious, spasibo! Especially for warnings on [not] using regular disks.

But from what I learned there, Chia is not a consumer’s tech, cause mainnet already requires huge TBW per dollar ratio, which ubiquitous Samsung EVO/Pro and alikes cannot do. It goes miners-are-special-hardware route again, sadly.

I wonder if it's feasible to use a ramdrive for the temp file. Or maybe the miners already run the number and decided it's cheaper to burn a stack of SSD every once in a while instead of investing in nodes with huge ram.

That would only be with enterprise class SSDs. I’ve been plotting on both consumer and enterprise and the former’s lifespan won’t be more than 3-4 months.

do you need to use ssds with chia?

No, it's just useful to use SSDs for plotting since they're faster. For farming any storage (HDDs, for example) are fine.

How about a RAM disk?

Sure but you need about 300GB RAM for the temporary files needed while creating plots.

Thinking about it, for someone who is looking to be seriously into chia, that might make sense. The cost of the RAM is only about $1,500. Might be a smart idea.

Has anyone tried this? Would be interesting to see the benefits.

Actually plotting in parallel across multiple SSDs is likely to have the highest TiB/day of plots created. And then you’d be better off using the ram to enable more parallelism.

It’s a matrix of processor cores, threads per core, temp drive bandwidth, memory, and temp drive speed. Oh and cost per TiB of plots per day.

Also plotting happens in several stages, and each has a different set of requirements. So timing the running of plots in parallel and staggering starts also comes into it.

Wouldn't the ram be idling most of the time while farming? Only storage space matters for farming, speed doesn't.

Honestly, this part I don't understand.

Somewhere over that couple days I read that you can farm on an HD, but plotting is faster on an SSD, so I'm making a huge presumption that plotting on a ramdisk would be even faster, without the wear on an SSD.

I'm still not clear on Chia. Sometimes I think I understand it, and other times I'm not so sure...

Plotting is the initial process of building the files that you farm with. Plotting is very CPU/Memory/Disk IO intensive and the total writes to a disk to build a ~100gb plot is over 1tb with ~260gb of temporary space used at any one time during the process. This means that the process of building plots (plotting) is best done with an ssd. The fact that the process writes over 1tb to the disk to generate a ~100gb plot means that you will be really consuming the life of a consumer grade SSD with a low TBW rating. It is possible to use RAMDisk and yes it is potentially faster for a single plot. But you would need ~260gb of ram to plot 1 plot at a time. Nvme SSD's are only marginally slower than ramdisk but they are much cheaper per GB and you can connect multiples of them meaning you can build many plots at once. ie. 1-2 plots per CPU core concurrently provided you have sufficient ram ~3400mb per plot and sufficient fast temporary storage SSD. Once plotted the plot file can be moved to a spinning disk HDD and farmed from there as very little reads are ever made in the farming process. Can you use Ramdisk? yes. Is it better? No. It's far cheaper and faster to use SSDs and use your ram for building multiple concurrent plots.

Thank you very much. That’s the first explanation that makes complete sense.