So… I have two spare laptops and a couple of 1tb usb drives with a standard 8mb/2mb dl/ul connection. I’m not at all tech savvy and was hoping to just use what I have rather than buying or building anything.
Is it worth me using both laptops or is that just taking up bandwidth and power so the second one is much less efficient? Would I be better off just using 1 and having both usb hard drives plugged in to it?
Also, when you say it has to be left on, does that mean sleep mode off and screen up 24/7, or does it just need to be connected and switched on?
I’d say nobody knows yet … I myself would expect that it’s possible to run more nodes on 2 laptops than on 1 and therefore you should get more “asks”, and more asks should mean more chances to farm a coin (as long as your bandwidth isn’t blocked by the many nodes …) … so I’ll use old laptops+my desktop pc+a raspberry … [but I have an electricity flat rate right now so …] … no wireless connection but a classic wired LAN link to your router will probably be way more important than anything else in terms of response time i think …
I’m not sure what you mean with “connected and switched on” → it needs to be able to run the client software; so switched on, sleep mode off and monitor turned off should be the most energy efficient way possible
Thanks dude, that’s good info, I was planning to use network cable direct to router… I will try with two laptops then, 1 extra usb harddrive on each. I have 20 solar panels on the roof, so I have to try and use as much of my electricity as possible (the govt pays me for what I produce, regardless of what I use).
Bandwidth will be my major issue I think, especially as we stream and download rather than using ‘tv’ at all.
Bear in mind that when you are serving data to the network the data will mostly be going up the connection, when you are streaming video it’s mostly coming down so it may not interfere too much. I think ping time/latency could be significant in what differentiates connections.
Someone in Birmingham UK requests a file, you have 1mb of it, I have the same 1mb, so do three or four other people.
Your computer is in the US,
Network ping time to you is 10ms, it takes that long for the request to reach you
You’ve got a hybrid drive and the 1mb is in the NAND as it’s a popular chunk. it takes you 2ms to retrieve the chunk.
Your 20Mbps up connection serves it to your ISP’s network in 5ms
It takes 10ms for it to get back across the Atlantic to Birmingham You serve the client with the chunk in 27ms
Mine is in the UK.
Ping time to me is 5ms it takes that long for the request to reach me
I’ve got a standard hard drive connected over USB 2. It takes me 10ms to get the chunk out
My 0.5Mbps up connection serves it to my ISP’s network in 20ms
It takes 5ms to go from me to London and then up to Birmingham I serve the chunk to the client in 40ms
I assume that you will be the one gaining rank in this scenario?
Just signed up and wanted to say hello! This all looks very interesting! I have a few questions. I am fortunate enough to have a Google Fiber 1 Gb Internet connection at home. Was thinking about throwing something together. I have about 10 2TB external usb drives hanging around. Would it be worth throwing my Dell T310 server in the mix with these drives attached? Thanks for any help and glad to be here!
Great! Thanks happybeing! The server currently only has 8GB of memory. Would it help to upgrade to 32GB? Thats as high as it goes. It also has a single Xeon quad core x3460 @ 2.8GHz processor.
No one really knows for sure, it’s all guesswork at this point. Id run it as it until a month or two after launch and upgrade then. It may be internal Sata drives would be a better way to spend money, or neither would make a difference. It sounds like a nice set up as it is…
I don’t know what the best mix will be but there will be time to test it different options and time for you to upgrade if you find that makes sense - join the test networks and see what works.
For that, watch the “Dev Updates” that come out each Tuesday - were hoping for the MVP by the end of this month as you probably know, so that will be the start.
For all the people that are not tech-saavy such as myself I have emailed Adafruit and asked if they would be interested putting together some packages for farming the SAFE network along with tutorials.
I have received a reply from one of the nice ladies in customer support saying she will pass the message on to their team so lets cross our fingers.
I will pre-order from them if they seem keen to jump on board and offer us a solution.
Anyone interested just like this post, I will keep track and can PM you guys or maybe chat to one of the mods and see of we can create a poll or something.
Ill be buying only because the machines I have at home are dedicated to other things. I could use my desktop PC but its a huge power waster, its klunkly and old and makes a terrible loud noise when it’s on. In fact if anyone wants it for spares and is in Melbourne, PM me its yours lol.
Cost I dont see being a huge problem as I see it as an investment into a few things and farming/safecoin is only one of them the other is in my own education and learning how to out this sort of stuff together as i’m super interested in Raspberry Pi’s, hardware and coding but just dont know that much about it all.
In terms of the spare laptops, they are a great idea. Thats what I used when I was mining some other crypto currencies until I fried them, lol.
The only issue might be in the amount of vaults they let you have. I think it is 1 per node and I am pretty sure they said they had a limit on vaults or something like that?
Also having two or more running nodes I believe would be more beneficial for various reasons.
In terms of leaving it on, it most definitely has to be on and running, you should be able to change your settings in your OS to run programs but sleep the screen or at least shut it so your not wasting valuable energy.
Thats awesome! I am going that way too only its super expensive here where I am but I see that as an investment and then I can buy a electric car and store my energy in that too !!!
Im worried about this too. I’m with Telstra and lately my Internet goes down at least several times each week. Its super weird. It just drops out for a few seconds or minutes. I think it has to do with the NBN build but ill be super pissed if that effects my farms rank…
Welcome! Pretty much what the others said. I am not that technical but from what I have read it looks like what will work for gaming will work really well here obviously minus sound, video but plus storage and then take that idea and replicate across more nodes.
The following comments are all handwaving, so don’t hold me to this but I know it can be helpful to get some feedback rather than nothing! Hopefully others will chip in too, especially if they disagree…
2GB would be fine for one or two vaults, but might start to get used up before your bandwidth as you try to run more and more - especially as this is Windows.
The other thing I would check and compare with alternatives is power consumption (of the whole system including disk - SSD helps this a lot, also speed but at a cost of course).
Samsung SSDs seem good quality and value - I’m on my second in my main laptop, and no failures yet. You can get cheaper, but I have no idea if that’s better value or a false economy.
Personally I’m starting with two identical dedicated farming systems: Odroid U3 and a big HDD (4TB), so I expect to find myself with more disk space than I have CPU/RAM/bandwidth to run vaults - at least in the early days. If my vaults start to fill up with junk, I will still have capacity spare to acquire newer, popular chunks. Others of course could just add capacity when this happens.
Having HDD I will use more power than SSD, but it is a lot cheaper for the amount of disk.
I will also run with some vaults stored in SDRAM which will help me establish how important read speed and latency are in farming performance.
Don’t take my setup as anything like “the best”. I bought it over a year ago, when we had much less understanding of how things might function than we do even now. I just think it helps to read about different setups and how each of us think they might perform.
Hardware looks decent for the price. Personally I have a prejudice against Windows, but that’s my problem not yours…
The thing I’d note about it is there’s no ethernet port, so you’ll be relying on wireless. In my experience a bit of copper is more reliable than radio.
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