Restoring old r270 mining rig

[2d40]

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'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?
  

In distant future perhaps I'd build a new rig - is there any guide how to build one in rack compatible case? I'd love to shove the rig into my server rack, but I'm worried I will not be able to give the GPUs enough air for proper cooling in tight 2U/4U case.

[rarecoil]

• 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? 
  

ROCm likes modern cards. The oldest supported card is Hawaii (GFX7, R9 390X). I have not had successes using ROCm with GCN 1.0 cards, and OpenCL pulled from amdgpu-pro does not appear to work. The only working OpenCL for GCN 1.0 on modern kernels appears to be the ancient mesa OpenCL which is slow and IIRC never was supported by hashcat/oclHashcat.

You would probably get better speed and definitely better perf-per-watt from selling all the old components and buying a single mid-level Pascal card used on eBay, or at least upgrading to a Polaris. That said, working on old tech is fun

• 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?
  

A 2TB Samsung 860 Evo is less than $200 from eBay. A single 10TB HGST can be had for around the same price refurbished on eBay. I have a lot of large wordlists that I store compressed and just expand when I need them into memory or SSD space. My entire wordlist collection is less than 500GB compressed. I would recommend simply using a small SSD and worrying about expanding this if/when you need the space.

• 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?
  

I am using ribbon cable risers on my rig right now and have had no issues with them. Most power draw is through the PCIe connectors.

[powermi]

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'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?
  

In distant future perhaps I'd build a new rig - is there any guide how to build one in rack compatible case? I'd love to shove the rig into my server rack, but I'm worried I will not be able to give the GPUs enough air for proper cooling in tight 2U/4U case.

To sum up my experience in few words: Go for Nvidia + GOLD PSU + Intel + SSD, in this order.
So I would sell what you have an just biuld something efficient just for Hashcat.

[2d40]

You would probably get better speed and definitely better perf-per-watt from selling all the old components and buying a single mid-level Pascal card used on eBay, or at least upgrading to a Polaris. That said, working on old tech is fun

Yep, Nvidia is definitely the most efficient way - I'm waiting to switch when I have more money to invest - this way I could use a rack mounted case and ipmi enabled motherboard (now I rely on shitty raspberrypi 0 hooked up to relay modules to be able to remotely reboot/poweroff and hoping I won't set my house on fire  yeah I know it can be done by using a relay to short power/reset pins on motherboard - I'm just lazy and had those two big nasty relays that could probably be used with an industrial lift  ). Working with old tech is fun and educative  nice to meet people that share this passion  

A 2TB Samsung 860 Evo is less than $200 from eBay. A single 10TB HGST can be had for around the same price refurbished on eBay. I have a lot of large wordlists that I store compressed and just expand when I need them into memory or SSD space. My entire wordlist collection is less than 500GB compressed. I would recommend simply using a small SSD and worrying about expanding this if/when you need the space.

This is an excellent idea! I happen to have a 250GB ssd lying around - I'll hook it up to 10TB HGST and away go my issues.

I am using ribbon cable risers on my rig right now and have had no issues with them. Most power draw is through the PCIe connectors.

Mine have an extra molex and a capacitor   back when doge coin was booming this rig (back then 6 gpus, now 3 gpus since R9 290 all died) it ran over 1.5 year non-stop  but it was long time ago, half of cards overheated (well, two did - one got sold) and the ones  that left have all patchy fans since the stock ones died  it looks like frankenstein-rig and hence my lack of trust

[2d40]

To sum up my experience in few words: Go for Nvidia + GOLD PSU + Intel + SSD, in this order.
So I would sell what you have an just biuld something efficient just for Hashcat.

Yep, just waiting for more cash influx so I could make a proper remotely managed setup (ipmi enabled mobo + rack mounted case).

[rarecoil]

This is an excellent idea! I happen to have a 250GB ssd lying around - I'll hook it up to 10TB HGST and away go my issues.

I'm not sure what's supported on ancient Ubuntu, but you can make an SSD-cached HDD (aka "SSHD") from two drives using bcache: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Bcache

This way you do not need to handle migration between slow and fast storage; you can just cache on the SSD transparently.