Best Safe Node hardware

It would be nice to use every computer inhouse, even my tv box i can use.

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Yes well it says:

The first consumer device to run snaps 


Bit misleading if this consumer first has to assemble his “box”, however simple it may be:

Why is it sold without the Raspberry Pi?

Nextcloud box should be as open as possible so the partners decided for the start not to deliver the Raspberry Pi. If you already own one you can connect your Raspberry Pi 2 to the box. There is a screw-driver, four screws, all necessary connection cables and a power supply in the box. If not, you have to buy it somewhere. Frank announced that there are working on a possibility to sell complete packages in the future.

WD includes these items either for 80 dollar or 70 euro incl. VAT:

  • 1 TB USB3 hard drive from WDLabs
  • Nextcloud case with room for the drive and a compute board
  • microUSB charger, cables and adapters, a screw driver and screws
  • microSD card with Snappy Ubuntu Core as OS
  • Apache, MySQL and the latest Nextcloud 10 pre-installed and ready to go

Seems reasonable if the HD itself is 50 dollar. The above mentioned article has a picture of a “WD10JMVW”-drive, showing “not for resale” on its label.

No experience with Raspberry PI-2 but I seem to remember there’s no way to connect an internal SATA HDD?

So did look it up in a German magazine I subscribe to - being Dutch - and pardon my French:

Raspi-Speicher

Die 2,5-Zoll-Festplatte aus der Serie WD Blue kommt mit aufgelötetem USB-Anschluss, ist also ausschließlich als USB-Festplatte einsetzbar. Das PiDrive ist entweder „nackt“ mit 314 GByte oder als Kit mit 1 TByte SpeicherkapazitĂ€t erhĂ€ltlich. Im Kit sind dann GehĂ€use, Netzteil, eine 4 GByte große MicroSD-Karte sowie ein USB-Kabel enthalten, dass sich in die Micro-USB Stromversorgung des Raspi einhĂ€ngt.

Possibly WD is dumping it this way:

Die Geschwindigkeit des PiDrive reizt der Raspi jedoch nicht aus: Mit seinem USB-2.0-Anschluss konnten wir maximal 36 MByte/s beim Lesen und Schreiben messen, ĂŒber den USB-3.0-Anschluss unseres Testsystems kamen wir in beiden FĂ€llen auf rund 90 MByte/s.

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What we know so far (most is not fixed in code afaik), it should be better to have more nodes with less but faster (reaction time) memory. But how exactly this will turn out has to be seen. I wouldn’t invest too much now. Once safecoin will be tested, we will quickly find out what works best in the beginning. I wanted to try the odroid-c2, but i can’t get it to work atm.

Is it possible to build a virtual testcoin / farming rig simulator that can demonstrate potential earnings based on resources committed? This may incentivize more participation.

I am going to give it another try. Which of the Debian longstreet builds are you using?

I would suggest getting the latest ones from the pine64.pro downloads page.

I use this image because it’s headless (no desktop; note I use ethernet not wifi with this)

pine64-image-debianbase-310102bsp-2.img.xz

I also have this image in my file list which I have tried only the once and had wifi working.

pine64-image-debianxfce-310102bsp-2.img.xz

On the WD page I found these items come separate in two products/bundles.

Bundle #1 or “WD PIDRIVE KIT>>>Regular Price $79.99”
Bundle #2 or “WD PIDRIVE ENCLOSURE WHITE SQUARE 6’‘X6’>>>Regular Price $10.99”

Without Rasp Pi that’s a total of US $91

Are these the same components being sold as “Nextcloud box”?

I ran a search on WD US page for “WD10JMVW” and it comes back as “No results found”.

On “Nexcloud Box” page I can’t find where a price for the box is quoted, if there is a direct link could you please share it?

Via link in msg @Traktion: Box - Nextcloud > “Get the Box” > “Select your country”:
https://wdc.com/products/wdlabs/wd-pidrive-kit.html#WDLB001RNN
Says there: “Comes With PiDrive Enclosure (3 options)”

I ran a search on WD US page for “WD10JMVW” and it comes back as “No results found”.


 showing “not for resale” on its label.

More information:

Thank you, I completely missed that line “Comes With PiDrive Enclosure (3 options)”

Which Rasp did you use? Is your box up and running now?

Only keeping tabs on things, don’t have this board myself but on the lookout for further developments :slight_smile:

I wonder what a Samsung Galaxy Note 7 would be like as a low power vault/farming rig
explosive! :joy: 
but without the battery of course.

Thing is, Samsung have millions of useless devices to dispose of, an environmental catastrophe, and it would salvage something for them to find a good use for them.

Just a thought.

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Oh man, and that’s just on wholegrains and oily fish? Brainpower!

Links I did save at some time:

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3D NAND set to dominate SSDs, kill off traditional flash
Manufacturers are ramping up production of new 64-layer 3D NAND

Three dimensional NAND (3D NAND) is expected to dominate the solid-state drive (SSD) industry beginning next year, as suppliers reduce their shipments of flash storage based on traditional 2D or planar NAND, according to a new report.

According to DRAMeXchange’s latest forecast, NAND flash manufacturers are focusing their efforts on converting fabrication plants to 3D NAND, which is denser, faster and less expensive to produce than traditional 2D NAND


Denser, faster and less expensive to produce?? Flash memory for Farming is likely to be a good thing. A Vault can deliver cashed chunks from RAM and other chunks from 3d-nand flash memory which is way faster than hard drives. “Archive Nodes” could store all chunks cheaply on a harddrive to recover the network after a global power blackout or extreme event. But overall, chunks going around without touching a harddrive would be a good thing.

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Greetings all. First post.

As the time draws nearer and nearer for actually setting up some farming hardware, I have so many questions.

I’ll not blast them out all at once, but I suppose the most important one to me at this moment, considering I’d like to build a reasonably substantial farm is related to hardware; everything I’ve read so far leaves me confused so I need to ask directly.

Would I be better off having a large SAFEbox with a huge drive array and goodly processing power running many instances of the farming software, or would it be better to run multiple virtual OSs in said box, each with a slice of storage space, running a single instance of the software, or would I be better off running a bank of small independent devices, SBCs, running through a common network hub?

I started mining BTC in 2011, so am kinda stuck with that way of thinking, so please excuse my ignorance, but is it possible to ‘point’ an arbitrary number of farmers at one wallet?

Right now I have a home-made 16TB Nas4free (powerful cpu), and 2x16TB Synology NASs, and a whole whack of old BTC mining hardware to play with. I need a little guidance so I can be ready for the launch. Need to know what hardware to buy or what I can use that I already own for best cost to benefit ratio.

Thanks! :slight_smile:

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Welcome @Mick

I don’t know what the right answer is, and I don’t think anyone can be certain. If you’ve read the discussions there are some good explanations of what factors are likely to be important, but given that what works best, will in itself affect the system, I don’t think it’s wise to believe in this or that solution.

Different people are trying different approaches based on different priorities. For some profit, for others interests or skill, fun, curiosity etc.

Which things you choose to evaluate will also depend on your circumstances (means, connectivity, cost of power etc)

So how can anyone else tell you what’s best!? :slight_smile:

My advice is to be aware of what is important to you and take steps that are as mindful of that as possible, whether they work or not. For some that’s small baby experiments and research to home in on a solution with low risk, for others it’s lots of research and analysis before jumping in in a bigger way.

One thing I think may be important is to try and stay aligned with the ethos of the project, because I expect that however it starts out, David and the team will be determined to keep on that track. In other words, to ensure as many people as possible can benefit from all aspects (not just farming) and that the project is socially beneficial too (eg rewards energy & resource efficiency).

I realise my answers on this are a long way from the concrete solution you are seeking, but I hope I’ve explained why I don’t feel able to give advice on that. I don’t yet know what I’ll be doing myself, but farming isn’t my highest priority. I do want to do it, and I will, maybe to profit, but also very much to support the launch and most of all I think, just to be part of something marvelous and exciting. Also so I can, one day, offer more concrete suggestions!

Good luck. This is going to be fun :slight_smile:

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I reckon we’ll find upload speed will be the most limiting factor for people who have a lot of spare hardware to contribute.

As happybeing said, there’s no way to know and it would probably be best to go slow rather than investing in any infrastructure upgrades yet. Farming is designed to steer itself away from centralisation (spare/free outcompetes economies of scale/cheap). So you may find you just want to stick a spare drive on the connection you already have and just enjoy the SAFEcoin price appreciation that will likely go on for decades. Much like bitcoin it will probably pay to start farming very early, but unlike bitcoin it (hopefully) won’t be worth spending loads of money buying specialist equipment to farm more of it. Utilising spare resources is the aim of the game here. You can probably make some decent coin from doing it earlier than everyone else, but it might be hard to make a load more of it than anyone else doing it at the same time as you.

Disclaimer - I’m the least technical person you’re likely to speak to on here, so take whatever I say with a very large pinch of salt. :wink:

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Thanks for the quick reply. (TL;DR - thanks, i’ll wait and see.)

I guess it’s ‘wait and see’ on the hardware front then
 In the meantime I’ll look for ways to get closer to the internet backbone and somehow have data-caps removed.

When I started mining BTC I did it at a great loss. My attitude was, no matter what happens, I want to contribute to change for the better. It was an idea I’d been thinking about since the mid-late 90’s, and someone cracked it finally. But I’m not typical. Most people would not do that.

This is the same feeling I have now about the safenet. I see it as something that will, once the technical challenges have been ironed out, make a huge positive change to the world, but, like the founders have said, we need a financial incentive to make it happen – and they used TOR as an example of something that hasn’t become widespread for that reason.

I eagerly anticipate news from the founders regarding hardware specs based on the limited testing they’ve done. The average person can use their computer in the background, but for those who want to accelerate adoption of the safenet, plopping a huge amount of storage out there, with commensurate speed, will compensate for the slow learning curve the average person will go through, and demonstrate the superiority of the technology. I’m one of those early guys so want to know as soon as possible how best to serve the cause, regardless of profit, but also understand that without a profit motive things will be slow.

In other news, and related to the topic: I’d love to see SAFEboxes pre-made and widely available, but with a twist. I’d like them to have an antenna and a radio transmitter/receiver. Something on legal wavelengths in whatever country, with the best range and bandwidth. I think the safenet is just the beginning. If we want to do away with the current internet paradigm, we need to create a free and open meshnet for the safenet to run on. I think this is a worthy and achievable goal.

Imagine small SAFEboxes the size of cellphones, with a small solar array (or other power source) - plastered everywhere! Something optimized that costs $20. The meshnet would grow like crazy, just for those wanting to use safenet for voice communication instead of rip-off mobile phone plans we deal with now.

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Abso-frickin-lutely bro! All very well said. This tech is certainly even more empowering and disruptive than blockchain (big words but I think they’re true) and it will need all the support it can get in the early days.

I salute you Mick. We need as many people like you as we can find this year. And I very much hope that in the end your commitment is rewarded. It is no bad thing when decent people end up with a chunk of money for doing the right thing. SAFE is all about empowering, liberating and rewarding its users.

There are a few threads about these subjects
 have a little bit of a dig and I think you’ll find lots of interesting conversations relating to future meshnet possibilities and pre-made SAFEboxes etc. Many others are on the same wavelength as you. You sound like a kindred spirit Mick. Welcome and thank you for stepping up and getting involved! It’s heart-warming to see the constant flow of bright people who fall in love with David’s inspiring vision. It is an intoxicating and addictive dream that’s frighteningly close to becoming a game-changing reality, :stuck_out_tongue_closed_eyes:

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I’ve bought a Odroid XU4, but the Alpha release doesn’t install on the device.
Has anyone experienced this until now?

I wonder what the lowest Watt usage was with a nice amount of vault and on what device.

Im looking to buy a small windows 10 comp. and add like couple TB for storage.