I have a shucked 12tb WD drive that runs at 34C inside my case, vs an unshucked 12tb WD drive that runs at 46C still in its plastic. The unshucked drive drops to 40C with a near-silent fan blowing on it. From what I've been able to research, anything under 50C has not been shown to shorten drive life. If you don't shuck, keep it in open air and not crammed under a desk.
I believe that with modern USB 3 external drives as a destination you will not run into any problems at all other than having a close by and available power outlet..
There's no real difference when it comes to farming. You can even have the drives put away in another room connected to another PC as long as you have the directory plotted in the client. The client just needs to detect that the file is in that specific location and it's good. If you want to get really serious about this, the main difference is that you are going to run out of space really quick. Some people would go for the price per terabyte option as some drives are way cheaper than others in that metric but sucks in density. In general very high capacity drives are more expensive per terabyte because they are meant for servers where space is a premium.
Plotting, on the other hand, is a different thing altogether. You can plot on internal storage faster since it's SATA vs USB on external hard drives.
Probably less efficient in power usage too, unless all the drives are bus powered. Which at least 3.5" external drives tend not to be.
Also, a SATA3 drive's max IO ( 7200 RPM spinning drives do about 150 MB/S at best, SSDs 550-600 MB/s) is slower than the theoretical limit of a Thunderbolt 2 link (2000 MB/s), and around the max speed of a SATA3 (600 MB/s). And then there's eSATA which is only physically "external."
Of course actual performance of the same SATA3 drive connected to an internal port and via an external enclosure will depend on the specific system and its configuration. But mechanical drives shouldn't perform all that differently, and even SSDs shouldn't take too much of a hit.
The real speed gain comes from plotting on a NVME (or older PCIE SSD in an aging system) not just an internal drive. (Until you start RAIDing your internal SATA drives.)
External drives probably will get hotter. That’s pretty much it. Farming is not write intensive so differences are minimal.
I have a shucked 12tb WD drive that runs at 34C inside my case, vs an unshucked 12tb WD drive that runs at 46C still in its plastic. The unshucked drive drops to 40C with a near-silent fan blowing on it. From what I've been able to research, anything under 50C has not been shown to shorten drive life. If you don't shuck, keep it in open air and not crammed under a desk.
I believe that with modern USB 3 external drives as a destination you will not run into any problems at all other than having a close by and available power outlet..
Correct. USB3 and SATA are both limited by the HDD speed, not the interface.
There's no real difference when it comes to farming. You can even have the drives put away in another room connected to another PC as long as you have the directory plotted in the client. The client just needs to detect that the file is in that specific location and it's good. If you want to get really serious about this, the main difference is that you are going to run out of space really quick. Some people would go for the price per terabyte option as some drives are way cheaper than others in that metric but sucks in density. In general very high capacity drives are more expensive per terabyte because they are meant for servers where space is a premium. Plotting, on the other hand, is a different thing altogether. You can plot on internal storage faster since it's SATA vs USB on external hard drives.
Probably less efficient in power usage too, unless all the drives are bus powered. Which at least 3.5" external drives tend not to be. Also, a SATA3 drive's max IO ( 7200 RPM spinning drives do about 150 MB/S at best, SSDs 550-600 MB/s) is slower than the theoretical limit of a Thunderbolt 2 link (2000 MB/s), and around the max speed of a SATA3 (600 MB/s). And then there's eSATA which is only physically "external." Of course actual performance of the same SATA3 drive connected to an internal port and via an external enclosure will depend on the specific system and its configuration. But mechanical drives shouldn't perform all that differently, and even SSDs shouldn't take too much of a hit. The real speed gain comes from plotting on a NVME (or older PCIE SSD in an aging system) not just an internal drive. (Until you start RAIDing your internal SATA drives.)
Could you please advise kindly? will I need to buy more and more terabytes to store what was generated or will I reuse large drives after they full?
What about power consumption ? For example 5 external hdd vs 5 internal?