Chia Farming & Plotting on TrueNAS SCALE 🌱 + 💠

Introduction:

After setting up Proxmox 7 to farm my Chia plots and mine Ethereum at the same time with each miner in their own virtual machine, i thought it would be good to try out TrueNAS SCALE as a main server for my SAMBA shares and since there is an official app made by the TrueNAS team for Chia im going to give it a go. Maybe install the Machinaris plugin also.

Also i will add some links where you can find more plugins for TruNAS.

Requirements:

• TrueNAS SCALE Beta 1 - 21.08 installed and running. (For Proxmox use HOST CPU)

• A pool (SSD) for plotting (if this makes no sense don't worry).

• A pool for storing plots preferably large HDD.

TrueNAS Dashboard:

This will be your main TrueNAS Dashboard view above. You can see i have POOL0 and HDD0. Adding the drives is pretty self explanatory but we are going to jump straight into adding our plotting drive and our HDD to store the plots created.

Adding Pools:

In the Pool Manager you should see any drives that you have attached to TrueNAS. Simply click suggest layout for TrueNAS to create a suggested layout if you have more than one drive. In this case i will be adding just one 4TB HDD

At this point you should have two pools, your main pool that was setup when you created the virtual machine or installed TrueNAS, and another pool or more that will be your storage for your pools. As you can see below we have one pool which will be our plotter and we will give it 300GB partitioned on a 1TB SSD that we passed through via Proxmox.

Choosing Pool For Apps:

At this point we are pretty much ready to set up our applications but first we need to add an application dataset to our SSD pool. We do this by going to the Apps tab and the notification to add a pool for your apps will pop up. You can choose any pool you like for storing your apps but i would recommend using your SSD not your HDD for your apps.

You can also go to Apps -> Settings -> Add pool if the notification didn't pop up.

Adding Apps With Truecharts

Before we install any apps here is how to get all the extra apps you see in the picture above.

Simply go to Apps -> Manage Catalogue -> Add Catalogue

We need to add the following catalog: https://github.com/truecharts/catalog

Select the type of apps you want to see in the "Trains". Different choices will give you apps in different stages of development.

Once you have added the charts the Manage Catalogs tab will look like the image below.

Now we are ready to install Chia on our TrueNAS SCALE system. Go back to Apps and deselect the Truecharts apps for now by clicking Available Applications -> Catalogs and deselect it for now so we only see the official apps.

Installing Chia or Mechanaris

Both apps have the ability to host a full node and plot. The TrueNAS devs have done a great job though packaging all the major apps needed like MadMax Plotter, the main Chia application into one bundle which works great and is constantly updated.