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
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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
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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
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