Chia Farming Setup

For a while I have wanting to set up a homelab of some sort to build my knowledge up in a fun little environment that doesn’t have the same rules as there are at work. A month ago I read about Chia and the differences in mining farming it compared to major cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin and Ethereum. Coincidentally I also just finished a new PC build (sans GPU, due to the aforementioned BTC and ETH), so I had the spare parts to get started. With a leftover i5-6600k and parts, all I needed was the storage, so I bought:

• 1x 2TB Sabrent Extreme Performance NVMe m.2 SSD ($300)
• 2x 12TB Western Digital Elements External HDD ($230/ea)

Let me be the first to say, cleaning the dust and crusted thermal paste out of a 5 year old build is more fun than it sounds. The green-ness factor of Chia is the most exciting. Anything that is potentially more profitable than Bitcoin mining without using more power than Argentina, Sweden, or Malaysia is cool in my book.

The filesystem was configured in a way to keep pre and post-pooling organization as simple as possible, but with ~7TiB used so far and a pooling release date of May 17th, I’ll likely have to come up with another plan. Oh well.

My investment rationale was simple. If I failed to get lucky early or home miners got priced out before paying off my initial investment, then I can easily use the parts for another project. And if I win, I’ll double down with a better CPU, a second plotting SSD, and more HDD storage. It literally can’t go tits up.

Progress Report:

Next up:

• Building a Plex server (if Chia fails me)
• Managing a Chia miner via CLI (if it doesn’t)

Read more about Chia here.