HARD DRIVE Mining? This is getting ridiculous...
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2018-05-06
·
1,647 words · ~8 min read
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so this side quest on our mining adventure was
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inspired by a post on the forums one of our users dreadcore tv
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is apparently considering buying a couple of 45 drive storinators to mine
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burstcoin a cryptocurrency that is mined
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with spare storage space rather than by using computational power
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from a CPU GPU or asic
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what this video is brought to you by ifixit
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okay so Jake has been bugging me to use the
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inactive half of petabyte project to
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mine burst coin for a while now see this one right here is actually off
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but i've been putting that off because
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the main benefits of the seagate enterprise drives that are in here are
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their performance which burstcoin doesn't benefit from and their long-term
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reliability which the burstcoin
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community says shouldn't be affected much but
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while mining burstcoin is not as taxing as like a heavy load consisting of lots
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of rights and lots of reads having the drives powered at all is worse than
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having them sit idle until i actually
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need to spin this box up for storage and
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if i had to replace even a few of these drives at hundreds of dollars each
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plus any maintenance downtime for my video editors
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that's just vomit frosting on a moldy cupcake
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then it hit me i've got a spare storenator
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with like nothing in it that i haven't even touched since limetech was
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validating 4k native sector drives with
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unraid and that's working now so it's sitting
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there doing nothing and on top of that
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i've got literally boxes
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of old hard drives that i mean
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i don't want to throw them away because like
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they're hard drives that would be a waste but i wouldn't trust them with any
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important data because they are old hard drives and that would be crazy
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so this is perfect now how am i going to get out of here
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okay so let's get started then if you want to mine burst coin there are
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a few things that you need to know first
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one i alluded to this before but i'll say it explicitly now
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high performance hard drives like this barracuda pro are not required with that
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said though it is recommended to choose ones that are rated for 24 7 operation
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like this wd red and it's also recommended that you disable any sleep
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features because in this application they can cause additional wear number
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two you want to avoid bottlenecks
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but you don't necessarily need a
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dedicated SATA connector for each drive
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so a SATA or a sas backplane with a
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multiplier would work great or failing
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that some users are even hooking up multiple drives in external usb 3
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enclosures with success number three a decent CPU or better yet
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a GPU will reduce the time that it takes to provision space on your drives for
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burst coin mining so it is strongly recommended to install a reasonably
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modern graphics card for the initial space provisioning called plotting
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after that you shouldn't need it and four
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hard drives require cooling
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now you don't have to run like a server chassis like this because
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investing in something so pricey is
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going to negatively impact your roi time
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since it contributes nothing to the actual mining speed
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but don't just stack up drives or run
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them without active cooling they'll be susceptible to damage from vibration and
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they will heat up both of which shorten their lifespan which is a really bad
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thing if you plan to resell the drives or use them for personal storage down
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the line okay
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so it's actually been a few weeks since my last update um it turns out
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that update number one is that slotting drives takes
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forever so in addition to my many core
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test bench i've actually had like hard drive docks connected to all
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available computers to finish the process
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and while apparently a GPU plotter that
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doesn't require optimization does exist by the time i was made aware of it i had
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already plotted most of my drives
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and update number two
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i had reached out to 45 drives remember
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they were the inspiration behind this video in the first place
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about doing up a custom version of their
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xl60 storinator with support for an
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extended atx dual socket motherboard
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and it's here so this
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combined with some of the hardware that i've dug out of mothballs
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should make for the ultimate the ultimate
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first coin mining setup
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look at this thing i mean if the size of your was
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correlated with the size of your storage server
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mine would be a lot bigger than it really is
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i i don't think this was specific for us yeah no
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i hope not just we can just scooch over that yeah
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no just well yeah sure there
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okay thank you that was the easy part
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now we got to go get the other store needed oh
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god this thing's heavy badminton's great for back strength
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floor
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thank you oh
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okay
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so by combining
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what's already good about the storinator xl60
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which is the low cost i mean relatively
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speaking and compact relatively speaking design that gives us
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60 direct attached drives
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with additional hardware capacity here in the
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back for check this out ah
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a large eatx motherboard this gives us
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room for an absolutely spectacular
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amount of hardware in here so 44 CPU
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cores that's a total of 88 threads for
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plotting nonces we've got 256 gigabytes
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of memory because well because we can on that particular
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one we've got four lsi sas 12 gigabit cards so these are
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each quad connectors each of which gives us
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four drives and then of course
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now it's time to transplant over all of the drives
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that we had in the other one
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this will take a little bit i really like what they've done with the
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new tool-less mechanism it's got these kind of uh
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soft pieces here and here so that you don't feel like you're just kind of
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mashing the drive against metal
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it also guides it in a lot nicer
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so the question burning in all of your minds right about now is probably okay
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Linus with all this effort
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and time and hardware that you've put into burst
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coin mining is it worth it
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and i'm gonna have the answer for you in just a moment here
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let's get our freshly transplanted drives
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fired up in our op system
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and check this out in the last
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about months or so with an average of about 150 terabytes of storage we've
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mined 4 000 burst coin
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which at today's price is a lot less than it sounds like
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uh point 3.2 cents u.s per burst
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so with uh i think we're up to about 160
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170 terabytes now with the capacity we have and the average we've done over the
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last little bit we'd mine about a hundred dollars of
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burst coin per month so what that means is if you've got some
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drives lying around with nothing actively being stored on them or
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you find some you know wicked killer deals on craigslist like i did with
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these drives right here thanks to its power efficiency compared
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to CPU or GPU mining it might make sense
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but if you were actually looking to get an roi off of like a ballon
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storage device like a storinator and a bunch of new you know helium-filled
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drives opening up your own
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cloud storage service is probably a better bet
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the how did you hear about us section we're gonna have that linked below
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so thanks for watching guys i hope you enjoyed this little
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sort of side quest in our mining adventure it
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ended up being a much deeper rabbit hole than i had initially thought i had
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intended for this to just be like an afternoon project and it ended up taking
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weeks but i definitely learned a lot i had fun with it which is the most
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important thing in all of this um if you guys dislike this video you can hit that
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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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don't know hard drives maybe you'll have that link below store kneaders uh at the
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links in the video description also link down there is our merch torch has cool
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shirts like this one and our community forum which you should totally join