HARD DRIVE Mining? This is getting ridiculous...

so this side quest on our mining adventure was inspired by a post on the forums one of our users dreadcore tv is apparently considering buying a couple of 45 drive storinators to mine burstcoin a cryptocurrency that is mined with spare storage space rather than by using computational power from a cpu gpu or asic what this video is brought to you by ifixit ifixit's protect toolkit gives you the tools you need to tackle any electronics repair challenge visit ifixit.com forward slash linus at the link below to get yours today [Music] okay so jake has been bugging me to use the inactive half of petabyte project to mine burst coin for a while now see this one right here is actually off but i've been putting that off because the main benefits of the seagate enterprise drives that are in here are their performance which burstcoin doesn't benefit from and their long-term reliability which the burstcoin community says shouldn't be affected much but while mining burstcoin is not as taxing as like a heavy load consisting of lots of rights and lots of reads having the drives powered at all is worse than having them sit idle until i actually need to spin this box up for storage and if i had to replace even a few of these drives at hundreds of dollars each plus any maintenance downtime for my video editors that's just vomit frosting on a moldy cupcake then it hit me i've got a spare storenator with like nothing in it that i haven't even touched since limetech was validating 4k native sector drives with unraid and that's working now so it's sitting there doing nothing and on top of that i've got literally boxes of old hard drives that i mean i don't want to throw them away because like they're hard drives that would be a waste but i wouldn't trust them with any important data because they are old hard drives and that would be crazy so this is perfect now how am i going to get out of here okay so let's get started then if you want to mine burst coin there are a few things that you need to know first one i alluded to this before but i'll say it explicitly now high performance hard drives like this barracuda pro are not required with that said though it is recommended to choose ones that are rated for 24 7 operation like this wd red and it's also recommended that you disable any sleep features because in this application they can cause additional wear number two you want to avoid bottlenecks but you don't necessarily need a dedicated sata connector for each drive so a sata or a sas backplane with a multiplier would work great or failing that some users are even hooking up multiple drives in external usb 3 enclosures with success number three a decent cpu or better yet a gpu will reduce the time that it takes to provision space on your drives for burst coin mining so it is strongly recommended to install a reasonably modern graphics card for the initial space provisioning called plotting after that you shouldn't need it and four hard drives require cooling now you don't have to run like a server chassis like this because investing in something so pricey is going to negatively impact your roi time since it contributes nothing to the actual mining speed but don't just stack up drives or run them without active cooling they'll be susceptible to damage from vibration and they will heat up both of which shorten their lifespan which is a really bad thing if you plan to resell the drives or use them for personal storage down the line okay so it's actually been a few weeks since my last update um it turns out that update number one is that slotting drives takes forever so in addition to my many core test bench i've actually had like hard drive docks connected to all available computers to finish the process and while apparently a gpu plotter that doesn't require optimization does exist by the time i was made aware of it i had already plotted most of my drives and update number two i had reached out to 45 drives remember they were the inspiration behind this video in the first place about doing up a custom version of their xl60 storinator with support for an extended atx dual socket motherboard and it's here so this combined with some of the hardware that i've dug out of mothballs should make for the ultimate the ultimate first coin mining setup look at this thing i mean if the size of your was correlated with the size of your storage server mine would be a lot bigger than it really is i i don't think this was specific for us yeah no i hope not just we can just scooch over that yeah no just well yeah sure there okay thank you that was the easy part now we got to go get the other store needed oh god this thing's heavy badminton's great for back strength floor thank you oh okay so by combining what's already good about the storinator xl60 which is the low cost i mean relatively speaking and compact relatively speaking design that gives us 60 direct attached drives with additional hardware capacity here in the back for check this out ah a large eatx motherboard this gives us room for an absolutely spectacular amount of hardware in here so 44 cpu cores that's a total of 88 threads for plotting nonces we've got 256 gigabytes of memory because well because we can on that particular one we've got four lsi sas 12 gigabit cards so these are each quad connectors each of which gives us four drives and then of course now it's time to transplant over all of the drives that we had in the other one this will take a little bit i really like what they've done with the new tool-less mechanism it's got these kind of uh soft pieces here and here so that you don't feel like you're just kind of mashing the drive against metal it also guides it in a lot nicer so the question burning in all of your minds right about now is probably okay linus with all this effort and time and hardware that you've put into burst coin mining is it worth it and i'm gonna have the answer for you in just a moment here let's get our freshly transplanted drives fired up in our op system and check this out in the last about months or so with an average of about 150 terabytes of storage we've mined 4 000 burst coin which at today's price is a lot less than it sounds like uh point 3.2 cents u.s per burst so with uh i think we're up to about 160 170 terabytes now with the capacity we have and the average we've done over the last little bit we'd mine about a hundred dollars of burst coin per month so what that means is if you've got some drives lying around with nothing actively being stored on them or you find some you know wicked killer deals on craigslist like i did with these drives right here thanks to its power efficiency compared to cpu or gpu mining it might make sense but if you were actually looking to get an roi off of like a ballon storage device like a storinator and a bunch of new you know helium-filled drives opening up your own cloud storage service is probably a better bet speaking of running your own business freshbooks freshbooks is the cloud-based accounting solution for small business owners and freelancers freshbooks lets you be more productive more organized and get paid faster it lets you create and send professional looking invoices in just a few seconds you can see when your client has seen your invoice putting an end to the guessing games they've got fully featured apps for android and ios allowing you to take the freshbooks experience with you on the go track your hours expenses all that good stuff and the best part is you don't have to take my word for it you can try fresh books including their 24 7 customer support for 30 days for nothing just go to freshbooks.com tech tips and enter linus tech tips in the how did you hear about us section we're gonna have that linked below so thanks for watching guys i hope you enjoyed this little sort of side quest in our mining adventure it ended up being a much deeper rabbit hole than i had initially thought i had intended for this to just be like an afternoon project and it ended up taking weeks but i definitely learned a lot i had fun with it which is the most important thing in all of this um if you guys dislike this video you can hit that button but if you liked it hit like get subscribed maybe consider checking out where to buy the stuff we featured i don't know hard drives maybe you'll have that link below store kneaders uh at the links in the video description also link down there is our merch torch has cool shirts like this one and our community forum which you should totally join

Channel: Linus Tech Tips

Views: 3,425,070

Keywords: hard, drive, mining, burst, coin, crypto, currency, cryptocurrency, storinator, hdd

Id: nJ4ea5NNqcg

Length: 11min 43sec (703 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 27 2018