Greetings everyone the hard drive gods have decended upon you with offerings of fortune and wisdom!
Just to help you down the road to success I have a few tools for you to maintain peak efficiency that I will not need to share links to but you can google them.
Firstly, if you find your miner is starting or well into slowing down it might be time to optimise with the burst optimiser available on this forum.
If you cannot find time to opimise with the plot optimiser you should be able to increase your miners memory buffer up to 1 gigabyte which will help speed up a little so you can plan when to optimise. Generally you can take of plots off a multi plot mining operation (per drive basis) to optimise them and then reintroduce them back to your plot collection.
Whats the biggest problem when plotting? well if your not using xplotter then the answer is: FRAGMENTATION!
YES THATS RIGHT! when you plot to a drive it can be fragmented and slow down.
unless of course you use a native linux partition.
Windows has a built in defragmenter but a faster one called puran defrag can defrag it for you.
To speed up to a contiguous plot and you have another hard drive that your plot can fit into a handy freeware tool called FastCopy has a customiseable cache to it. Simply put as much free ram into it as you can and then transfer the plot from drive to drive will end in a perfectly contiguous plot. Much faster than defragging especially an external drive; which are slower to plot and defrag.
Every quartly year, it is a good idea to refresh your drives magnetic surface. There is a tool on the same puran website as the above mentioned defragmenter that does the job nicely within a windows schedule that is fully automatic and doesnt affect mining efficiency. Basically it maintains and strenghens your drives magnetic pickup of written data to allow faster reading.
Advanced Tip: There is a feature set in your computers hardware configuration accessible on power on. It is called the system BIOS (Basic Input Ooutput System) Within there are certain menus of hardware configuration. It is safe to look at but if you see ANY feature called "spread spectrum" please switch it off. It is used to suppress E.M.I emmissions but also can seriously hamper efficiency in mining / plotting operations. Switch it off and if any problems arise from your surrounding electronics you can switch it back on. NOT RECOMMENDED FOR PERSONS USING MEDICAL OR PACEMAKER TECHNOLOGIES.
the included CPU/AVX miner can cache up to 1 gigabyte of read plot for the cpu this can be adjusted from its default to a more optimised size for faster cpu's. Personally I just leave it to 1 gb
Live long and prosper and may the burst be with you!