Hi,
I have an old mining rig based on coupld of R9 r270 GPUs. It's stable and working fine on ubuntu 14.04 and ancient radeon drivers - everything boots from my custom ubuntu14.04 livecd flashdrive (+ single HD for wordlists). I'm happy with the performance for my humble needs (pentest related - mostly NTLM cracking jobs), but hashcat keeps complaining about ancient driver. Here are a couple of questions:
I have an old mining rig based on coupld of R9 r270 GPUs. It's stable and working fine on ubuntu 14.04 and ancient radeon drivers - everything boots from my custom ubuntu14.04 livecd flashdrive (+ single HD for wordlists). I'm happy with the performance for my humble needs (pentest related - mostly NTLM cracking jobs), but hashcat keeps complaining about ancient driver. Here are a couple of questions:
- I'm tempted to install fresh linux on new hdd with ROCm drivers (for sake of some improvement). Will they even work with R9 (I mean without crashing constantly etc)? Is it worth spending time to toy with them with those ancient GPUs or should I better roll with what I've got?
- I'm planning to invest in some HDDs to expand wordlist storage. I'm on a budget so I'd go for 4 consumer magnetic drives instead of SSD. Now I'm wondering whether it is worth to make zfs or other raid0 setup to speed up the I/O. My bet is that hashcat will hardly benefit from faster io (only when loading wordlist into gpu ram, right?) and I will only get some slight improvement when processing wordlists. Or am I wrong?
- The rig is based on hacky tape-based risers for GPUs. They work fine - any benefit from the ones based on usb3? apart from looking nicer and costing more perhaps not having fire in house?