It was Saturday May 1st, I was playing League of Legends with a friend when I heard about a new crypto coin called chia, a major difference was this coin was design to mine not through graphic cards but hard drives, yep, hard drives, it took my attention enough to investigate a little about it. After investigating a couple of hours, I thought this could be something, one of the objectives was to reduce the amount of electrical energy that current cryptocurrencies infrastructure requires, the solution seemed simple, changing the approach, instead of redundant calculation processing, make redundant searches on hard drives(HD), at the end HD uses less energy that graphic cards(and miners devices) by far.
Most of the news at that time were about shortage of SSD and HDD in China because of this new crypto coin, then my first thought was "OMG there will be no hard drives too" so I end up buying an nvme 500gb, a 1tb SSD, and 4 hard drives 2x8tb, 12tb and 6tb, it was around $700, and then started following the instruction from chia installation guide.
My first shoot was on ubuntu over Virtual Box machine, I gave it 16gb RAM and 6 cores, it handles to run 4 plots in parallel but it was extremely slow, each plot was lasting between 2 and 3 days each, even with the nvme and ssd drives, the processor didn't seem to reach even 90% so I gave up and decided to use native linux.
So I installed ubuntu from scratch and started plotting, I realized that the nvme was slightly faster, but didn't see much difference between the ssd and hdd, on average the plots were lasting almost 20 hours, it was a great improvement but still not compared to what other people were posting in Reddit or twitter(between 6 and 8 hours per plot), so I noticed most of these guys had a premium processor like ryzen 7, ryzen 9, core i7, core i9, etc.
My ryzen 5 2400g is no match to those processors, but I remembered that I could overclock it to get more juice, so I increased the speed to 3.8Ghz on all cores and I noticed a considerable improvement, now the average of plots is 14 hours, not bad, now I can get an average of 7 plots by day.
Right now I have 50 plots farming, no luck with a reward yet, in conclusion the experience has been great, I learned a little bit about linux file systems, some new commands, overclocking, even making league of legends playable on linux with vware(btw it's free on linux for personal usage), and not believe in what others says, I prefer to spend 2 more hours plotting in a HDD than destroying an expensive SSD or nvme.
BTW do yourself a favor and install linux as your main OS, I'm really happy with the performance, the free tools for everything, not supporting most of videogames is great because I don't spend much time on it anymore, now I have time to run and take a nap at noon. And if you ever need windows, you have the virtual machine, you won't regret it.
Happy farming!