Best Safe Node hardware

Greetings!

This is much more in line with what I am familiar with. I have a gaming rig now that just mostly mines (actually folds for Standford), but that just uses GPU and a tad of CPU. All my HDD space is open. I dont see why mining/folding and farming would be mutually exclusive… they should not be. Therefore I suspect my computer could take on that role as well.
CPU: AMD 8350 8 core
RAM: 8GB expandable to 32GB
HDD:
300GB Raptor
3 * 1TB WD Red
1 800GB WD Green
NAS with 2 2GB WD Red in mirror

Other minor drives, of which I can bring a total of 7 online at any one time (plus NAS)
2 * 160GB HDD
1 500GB HDD

Others thoughts:
While waiting on a NAS app to appear, I suppose I could just map a NAS drive to main PC and then indicate that as a local drive. Besides mirrored drives the NAS has its own dedicated UPS.

I am excited to be a part of such a engaging experiment.

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It may (but it may not, it depends) refuse to use a file share. You can try iSCSI instead of file share.

But if your system (CPU) is regularly maxed out, it may be slow to respond so who knows how it’s going to rank on the network in terms of fulfilling requests. You can lower the maximum CPU limit to 70% or something like that.

Hear hear! Many folks have been discussing storage space when talking about hardware. I’m not so certain that will be the most relevant factor either-- I think warren’s got it quite right. From my reading of the docs, you earn Safecoin for delivering data. So, the best mining rig would be the contraption (and I think he got it right by describing things that don’t really exist yet and I got it right using the word “contraption”) that would allow you to deliver the most data to the most people with the least latency.

Mesh cell phones definitley sound like winners under this model.

Does safecoin take into account the relative scarcity of data in a region? Say, for example inside of a national firewall or a war zone? Do rewards go up for delivering data to these hard to service areas?

On the other hand, assuming that we can piggyback effectively, do prices go down in places where 1gbps fiber is commonplace?

If you really want to prepare for safecoin, I Think that the best strategy is instead to network yourself as widely as possible. Look into exotic solutions, even. Have multiple layers of redundancy and multiple distribution techniques. Then, the hard drives matter :).

(and if I am wrong, please tell me so-- thsi is an exciting project and I certainly want to have a good grasp on this tech when it hits the worlld with its tidal wave of brilliance.

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I have just bought an Odroid U3 and a XU. I will add two 2tb hard drives. I am completely new to this and you seem like the guy to ask. Can you tell me which steps I should take to set up my Odroids and hard drives to get them up and running for the start of Safemaid farming. Which are the steps and which guides or tutorials needs to be followed?
Thanks in advance.

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Do tell! When does farming start, anyway?

Thanks!

I added a FAQ that should help you get MaidSafe Built on Odroid and you’ll get great support on the Odroid forum too.

I suggest: 1) Get Ubuntu going, 2) Get a drive working (use the Odroid forum if you need help), then 3) Get the MaidSafe code built (using the FAQ link above).

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No fixed date, but hopefully before end of the year - see @janitor’s post above for more.

Big thanks, that’s a nice checklist. This will be a fun project and a challenge for the fall and winter besides the studies.

Been thinking about hardware and bandwidth. Bandwidth seems to me like a big issue for successfull farming, What bandwidth will be enough. Right now I have 100/10 Mbit/s but will be able to level up to 100/100 Mbit/s at most. But that speed is only just over 12MB/s, any hard drive and system will make that speed many times over.

Wonder how many hard drives Odroid U3 and XU will be able to serve and what load for farming each hard drive gets compared to it’s size. Maybe it is questions that the future will tell.

If your 100/10 Mbps network is not in data center but at home, then you probably won’t get the theoretical value.
Also you made a mistake with 12 MB/s. As a farmer you’re uploading (they’re downloading), so it’s 1.2 MB from the SAFE network viewpoint.
For that you need just one Odroid U3. That may be enough even for 12 MB/s.

Also seems to me that the most important factor is going to be your ability to upload data to the network. No point providing 40tb of storage if you only have a 1Mbps upload speed…

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Intuitively I think it seems that big storage means big upload bandwidth, but I’m not sure what the reality will be. How often will any chunk on a particular drive be accessed? We don’t know. Think about your own hard drive - how much of that data just sits there unread? How much is read/written each day? Obviously it depends on what you do and the kind of data, which makes it hard to envisage what a typical vault might experience. And of course the rank system means that this will vary a lot according to how machine vault configuration and performance (storage, response time, and availability) translates into rank.

One app I’ve been thinking of writing, because it interests me and is simple, is a farming stats app (so I finally posted it: SAFEapp: Farming Performance Tables). App users would put any info in it they want to share about their hardware setup, type of connection, system availability, current rank, farm rate, and that data would be included in a shared database as a sortable/filterable table. I think it would be very popular! Although I’m guessing MaidSafe might have this kind of thing covered.

The reason it is so hard to estimate what bandwidth will be required is because we don’t know where the sweet spots will be. For instance, data that is in high demand will be cached local to the demand. So data that goes viral might get lots of GETS for a while, and then diminish. Data that is accessed regularly but doesn’t tend to hang around in a cache long enough to shortcut many GETS will probably turn out more lucrative over the long term.

I bet MaidSafe have some estimates - or working ranges - but even they don’t know. Its the same for de-duplication. I wouldn’t bet on anything except availability, storage size right now and power consumption right now. Others are thinking response time and bandwidth but I’m not convinced. I’m going to try a couple of low power Odroid-U3 with a big disk on each, sitting on a cable broadband connection (ADSL unfortunately :-()) as my main setup, plus see what happens with laptop (and if possible phone) on very intermittent connections. The data will be very interesting.

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I meant of course the upgrade to 100/100 mbit/s equals approximately to 12 mb/s upstream. But thanks anyway. :slight_smile:

I see… You’re right!

if I use macbook pro to farm what is the difference and disadvantages? I can use external storage disk via usb port.

10TB it’s not much but it’s a start

Original article is here on Arstechnica

Western Digital’s HGST unit announced on September 9 that the company has begun to ship a new version of its helium-filled disk drive, the Ultrastar He8—with 8-terabytes of data storage capacity. And the company has an even bigger capacity drive waiting in the wings. That drive, which uses a new magnetic recording technology, will have a capacity of 10 terabytes.

Seagate began shipping its own non-helium 8TB drive in August, cramming more capacity onto five disk platters (though the company has said little about the recording technology used to achieve that). HGST’s 8TB drive, however, uses pressurized helium to help it cram two more disks into the drive, while still relying on widely used perpendicular magnetic recording (PMR) technology.

That isn’t the case for the next drive in HGST’s arsenal. The 10TB drive, now being “sampled” to select customers, is based on “shingled magnetic recording” (SMR)—a technology that partially overlaps data tracks like roof shingles.

Sadly, you probably won’t be seeing a 10TB drive in your desktop or notebook PC any time soon.

Because of the way its tracks are laid down, SMR is better suited to continuous writing and erasing of data, such as writing log files, storing a constant stream of images, or handling “big data” stores like Hadoop. They’re less well suited to the short, random reads and writes of typical applications.

Still, SMR pushes the potential density of storage media up to 3 trillion bits per square inch of disk platter, compared to the 200 gigabits per inch of PMR. That means that customers who have to keep huge quantities of “cold” data—such as the millions of images that Facebook users post each day—will be able to squeeze significantly more capacity into their already bulging storage systems.

I’m totally clueless to what this Hardware could mean to Maidsafe, but maybe…

This can be found on Kickstarter
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/adapteva/parallella-a-supercomputer-for-everyone?ref=nav_search

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I think you guys should look into ZFS and the options it has to offer. You wouldn’t want your rating to go subzero everytime a drive fails so probably a raid5/6 setup (raidZ and raidZ2 in ZFS terminology) would be most effective. It supports SSD drives as cache so the chunks most used will be cached there, not read from moving platters.

Also try to stay clear from using 3-4-5-6-7-8 TB harddrives as they are very fragile.
It might sound appealing to run for example 5 x4 tb drives in a raid5 setup, but when a drive fails you need to recalculate parity for a lot of data, which means all your data needs to be read again from the leftover fragile disks. Even enterprise class drives suffer from this phenomenon.

Not using zfs will also cause a problem with another phenomenon: Silent data corruption.

I can’t find the source anymore but I once read that according to Netapp one in 70 sata drives will at some point corrupt your data without noticing it itself.
SAS drives do a lot better, but come with a hefty price tag.

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hi all,

newbie so don’t be mean!! :wink:

can i ask a few questions with regards hardware and suitable os’s?

with hardware do you think we will see nice easy to use and setup apps for the likes of synology boxes?

i have a couple of their nas devices with numerous apps running, nice, simple, stable and easy to manage, there is strong community writing apps for use on the systems.

os’s: the obvious one being freenas which would combine a zfs file system with the ability to run apps within the box, much more open source than synology, but equally well supported and free to use.

next question, has anyone tried to run on ubuntu from within a vm system? this would be my choice if possible as i can bring servers on and offline as required, snapshot etc. would like to try, is there a specific set of instructions for setting up in ubuntu?

been following maidsafe for 3 or so years so am looking forward to it going live with bated breath…

cheers

rup

NOOOOOOOB!!!..lol As you can see, I’m too thick to answer you, but stick around, someone will chip in with the answers soon I expect.

Welcome @rupert :slight_smile:

Don’t be afraid of @Al_kafir, its just he’s from Madchester.

I can’t answer defo about the Synology boxes/OS, but I do expect such devices to be supported if at all possible. I have an excito B3 that I was trying to build on (Debian/arm5) but have given up at least for now, but if the synology toolchain is up to date it should be feasible.

I have built and am running on a general purpose single board computer Odroid-U3 with Ubuntu 14.04.

VMs are definitely ok, though you might like to try a more lightweight Docker container. I’ve used this on Debian but not tried on Odroid as Docker don’t yet support 32 bit. There is a ready to use MaidSafe Docker container - see link.