[/quote]

It's difficult to quantify the value of reading through the Plots faster, but my feeling is that every second counts, particularly on any Block that is found in under a minute. I have got rid of my Hub as that was slowing things compared to USB drives plugged straight to the mainboard and have also added a USB controller with 4 dedicated 5Gbps channels for the rest.

The main 36TB now is read in 9 Seconds and I am sure it has increased the amount of Burst I am earning. Only trouble is that it's expensive to have a dedicated channel for each USB drive...

Rich

[/quote]

36 Tb in 9 seconds is very fast, guess these are optimized plots? I am currently optimizing my plots on the main host (a Semi professional QNAP, NAS which has 43 Tb) and it currently takes 45 seconds (un-optimized plots) so nowhere near your speed. I don't think that hardware is rate limiting, it has a dual GB connection (trunked) and it reads to my workstation with 235 MB / s (close to the 2 Gbit it should have). The other drives are more of a problem, some reside in old DLINK NAS units which reads at best 15 MB / s. Those that are hooked up directly to internal SATA channels are fine (Seconds to read) but one computer has 12 drives hooked up. I don't know how the threading works in the miner (Blagos miner), but it seems that some are read very late. The CPU on that machine is a 2 core i3 so it does not handle threads well.

I did not realize this was a major problem, but I will try to optimize the hardware. Do you have any feeling if internet connection could be limiting (I am on a slow DSL (8 mbit) connection, which is stable but latencies are probably terrible.

/