And long and short of it...
-You need A LOT of HDD storage... for solo mining TODAY the minimum is around 200TB, speed is not needed, best is to use external HDDs attached to USB hubs.
-Pool mining is only avalible today at hpool, what is shady at best. Yet, im using it in order to see what happens.
-In order to be able to mine you need to create the "plot" files, then the miner uses those plot files to mine, this process uses very low bandwidth.
-The plot files needed are the K32 ones, that uses 108GB for the finished plot file and 239GB of temporal space in order to generate it.
-The plotting process uses 2 or more threads, and around 4GB of ram to create one plot (you can configure that), the temporal files needs a very fast NVME, and still takes several hours to complete.
-You only need the NVME for the temporal files to generate the plots, when your HDD storage is full of plot files SSDs arent needed anymore.
-Creating one 108GB plot writes around 1.5 to 1.8TB of data to the SSD, so 2TB consumer NVMEs only work to plot around 200TB. Sata SSDs will die very fast and cant be used.
-Ramdrive plotting using server motherboards arent any faster than a NVME, this is due to the fact that plotting is not optimised for this due to having to make a lot of ram copies, but i guess once DDR5 hit the market and >256GB is possible with consumer hardware that someone will come up with a plotter that works only on ram whiout having to use ramdisks.
-Pool mining may need re-plotting... thats a huge problem, hpool does not need re-plotting, you can use your solo plots on the pool.
-Difficulty is ramping up FAST.