Well from what I hear plotting to a NAS is indeed slow.  This is all Direct Attach Storage (DAS)  My drive brands varies but its mostly hgst/hitachi with some seagate and WD mixed in.  All 2TB 7200rpm enterprise drives.   If you just have a pc to use for a miner/plotter I would buy sata expansion cards and sata cables and just plug all your hard drives in directly.  It is a little bit of a messy setup but you can build something to hold onto the drives or actually i have seen some frames pretty cheap.


So this is pretty simple setup. My server is an IBM x3550 m4 with dual xeon e5-2670 chips, 80gb of ram.  I am using netapp ds4243 24 bay enclosures that house 2tb 7200rpm enterprise drives. So in total this setup is 240tb (slightly less because of usable space. These enclosures are supposed to be used with a netapp controller.  I didnt want the added expense plus dealing with their software licensing.  They are qsfp so I bought a standard LSI HBA card and a qsfp to mini sas cable and plugged the top enclosure into the card and daisy chained the rest of the enclosures with their standard qsfp cables.  I don't run any raid so these are all just stand alone drives. I plot each one so that if a drive goes down I can revert to my notes and just replot its replacement with the exact plot numbers that was on it.

I can plot 4 to 5 drives a day. I get about 32k nonces per minute optimized with my chips. My main bottleneck when it comes down to plotting is my disk write speed. I am only getting about 80 or 90MBps. I dont think its my drives as most of them are rated for 150MB write speed or above so it could be the back plane on the enclosures themselves.

I ran the setup with windows server 2016 and with ubuntu 16.04 and ultimately went with ubuntu.  My nonces per minute were a little better with windows but my plot times were significantly slower so I went with ubuntu.