How active do the Chia plots need to be?

[Zerophase]

I'm in the process of building a massive ZFS storage array to back up my data. Since I'm going to have to be running various benchmarks to figure out all of the special disks required, and how to spec it with a cache pool I might as well use Chia as part of my benchmarking. I might be able to get fairly cheap storage through Backblaze. If I dump my plots there before taking the pool down to reconfigure do I require the databases to have an active internet connection for my chia plots?

It's going to be mostly HDDs, so probably not ideal for Chia. But, I need a bunch of SSDs as well to help mitigate bottlenecks with writes and reads. Once I get the initial pool all specced. I'm going to add a cache pool that transfers the plots down to the HDDs for my HSM. So, maybe the finished machine will be efficient at mining Chia. I figure if it can do that well it'll work well for whatever I throw at it with more consistent workloads.

Anyone know if Backblaze is Chia friendly at an affordable price? I figure if it is maybe I could at least break even on the cost of this storage array if I can get 8,000 Chia over the course of a few years.

[BrandtH22]

Hey @Zerophase , we generally do not recommend farming with cloud storage due to latency and increased bandwidth requirements.

Your farmer needs an active internet connection and access to a synced full node in order for you to farm plots. This is because your node gets challenges from the network in order to identify which plot(s) is/are eligible for block creation.

[BrandtH22]

Closing this discussion as no response or additional questions from OP. Feel free to reopen this ticket or open a new one if this was closed in error or questions persist.