BEST HARD DRIVE FOR BURST COIN MINING.

[felixbrucker]

Is there any sensible roi in hdd mining?

roi is 6-7 months, very long time, because 1 6TB can only give you 0.045 btc a month and cost $200 i think, but the 4TB give better ratio, should do 0.03 a month and cost only $100, roi 2.5 months, they pumped burst recently, which is a good thing for roi

When you do the ROI, do you include the electricity cost?

 Electric cost on a hard drive is trivial. I can't think of one I've seen that ate 10 watts for a while, and can't remember the last one I saw that ate 15.


 I'm sure the SMR drives plot slowly - but you only have to plot ONCE, and you don't have to plot the entire drive as a single plot file.
 I'll speak with more authority about that in a couple weeks, I've got an Archive on order but it doesn't show up 'till next week - probably going to put it in a new system build, but I might put it in one of my older existing systems instead.


 I do agree with "go for the lowest cost per TB" though - and Europe prices seem to be real spotty compared to US pricing, probably due to less competiton and higher pricing in part due to the VAT that many (most or all?) EU countries seem to love.

Yes indeed only once, but i disagree on the multiple plots
You certainly can create multiple plots on one drive, but then you require more head moves as the data isnt continuous but split up
Optimized plots have all data for a given scoop stored in a continuous order like this:
(left unoptimized, right optimized)

Now when you have multiple plots your drive will have to move heads <Plot count> more, which will cost you some precious time in rounds

Regarding gpu asissted plotting: i wasnt able to plot a 8tb plot with the gpu plotter because it would have required some insane amount of ram (system ram that is), might work with virtual swap/ram stuff needed for claymore as well, not sure (as well for performance)

[cptfisher]

approximately 2 weeks

[QuintLeo]

For 8TB internal drives, these are the cheapest I've found and they are reliable:

Seagate Archive HDD v2 ST8000AS0002 8TB 5900 RPM 128MB Cache SATA 6.0Gb/s 3.5" Internal Hard Drive Bare Drive
https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822178748

There are also these in an external, but I cannot vouch for their reliability:

Seagate Expansion 8TB USB 3.0 3.5" Desktop External Hard Drive STEB8000100 Black
https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822178951

 The expansion is reported to use the Archive internally.

 http://www.storagereview.com/seagate_backup_plus_external_hard_drive_review_8tb

 among other sources.

 Wierd that it's selling for quite a bit less than the bare drive.

[NiHaoMike]

Best Buy also has 8TB WD external for $180 each if they still have stock. Seagate seems to have had a reputation for poor reliability, but then again, for HDD mining, breaking even well within the warranty period is good enough and losing the plot isn't nearly as bad as losing precious data...

[maleemk]

I have just built AMD Ryzen 1600 with 32 GB Ram and Rx 570 4GB. and i am planning to plot 2 HDD at a time. One with my this Ryzen System and One with My Old Intel Sandy Bridge 6 core system with 64 GB ram and 6GB Titan Graphic Card. 2 HDD plotting at a time.

[MA3A]

Curious if anyone has ever done a RAID array for this type of mining...or it does not make sense?
Where is good info on hdd mining? so far i see a very sporadic info on this

[QuintLeo]

Best Buy also has 8TB WD external for $180 each if they still have stock. Seagate seems to have had a reputation for poor reliability, but then again, for HDD mining, breaking even well within the warranty period is good enough and losing the plot isn't nearly as bad as losing precious data...

 Backblaze publishes specs on reliability for all of the drives they use in their production "vaults" - ballpark 40 THOUSAND of them as of the last posted report.

 Seagate models have consistantly been a lot lower reliability on almost every listed model (and lower but not by a LOT on the rest) than WD, which tend to be lower reliability than HGST (especially the HGST enterprise models) - but Backblaze doesn't use EVERY model that have been made by those makers.
 They do tend to indicate trends though.
 They also have some Toshiba drives, but I forget where those fell at, and the number was kinda low - I think they were close to the WD numbers but the total drive count was low enough to not be definitive.


 RAID on a BURST mining setup doesn't make sense.
 It's not "critical irreplaceable data" where losing it would cost you a ton - if the drive goes down you just replace it and replot the new one, not a big deal.



 I hope that Ryzen system isn't for a pure mining system - if it is, that's MASSIVE overkill.
 Ignore this comment if it's primarily a gaming system that mines when you're not actively playing on it.

[maleemk]

Its not just for Burst mining. Its my Minting server. Burst Mining, Gunbot, Minting different Coins and will be my MasterNode for 2 coins.
So will justify itself in the long run.

[Elder III]

Well, actually Ryzen is a pretty nice CPU miner. My Ryzen 1700X @ 4.0 can make $2.40+ a day CPU mining AEON, or ~$1.30 mining XMR. (using just 8 threads). Since you need a CPU anyways, you might as well get one that will pay for itself and have much better resale value if you you want to sell it several years later.

Anyways, our Burst rig is almost done synchronizing the wallet, so I'll be able to stumble about and teach myself how to plot the 40 TB we have installed. I suspect I will end up watching a tutorial on YouTube before it's all done. :p

[QuintLeo]

Well, actually Ryzen is a pretty nice CPU miner. My Ryzen 1700X @ 4.0 can make $2.40+ a day CPU mining AEON, or ~$1.30 mining XMR. (using just 8 threads). Since you need a CPU anyways, you might as well get one that will pay for itself and have much better resale value if you you want to sell it several years later.

 In my case, I go with A10 APUs 'cause the GPU side is quite efficient on Distributed.Net work (which barely even touches RAM at all as it all fits into CACHE, data too) - and I've been pushing DNet for almost 2 decades now (28 Febuary 1998 - yes I WAS involved in DNet efforts to brute force crack DES and RC5-64, RC5-72 is proving to be a tough nut though).

 CPU cores do the BURST mining, and the discrete GPUs earn the serious bucks.

 

[nnekic86]

hi

maybe dumb question, but I'm new in this

Can I have few HDD and make 1 big one (for example, 8 HDD x 500GB) or can I use storage with capacity of 10TB

[QuintLeo]

Just use them as individual drives, no need to do anything fancy like JBOD or such.

 I don't see any reason why 10TB (or bigger) drives won't work, as long as your MB supports them and they're formatted properly under an OS that supports BIG drives.

 10 at this time however is NOT cost effective, unless you already HAVE the drive(s) - 8TB seems to be the current sweet spot on capacity per $.


 So far, I'm batting 50/50 on the Seagate Expansion external drives I have bought - one was an Archive, the other was a Compute.

[nnekic86]

Just use them as individual drives, no need to do anything fancy like JBOD or such.

 I don't see any reason why 10TB (or bigger) drives won't work, as long as your MB supports them and they're formatted properly under an OS that supports BIG drives.

 10 at this time however is NOT cost effective, unless you already HAVE the drive(s) - 8TB seems to be the current sweet spot on capacity per $.


 So far, I'm batting 50/50 on the Seagate Expansion external drives I have bought - one was an Archive, the other was a Compute.

Thx for info, I will try

[decibelio]

A question. Can you plot a hard drive on a PC (core i7 / 16GB RAM) and mount it on another to mine (Core 2Duo / 4GB RAM)?

Or can I move the plot from one HDD to another?

Thank you.

[QuintLeo]

I routinely plot any drive with a dedicated partition for BUST mining on my Ryzen gaming machine then move the drive to the machine it will be used in.
 (It's lovely that LINUX handles HPFS partitions for this sort of thing).

 Makes it easier to keep the plots from overlapping, as well as gets them plotted a LOT faster than anything else I have.

 You CAN move plot files from one drive to another, as long as the file is smaller than available space on the drive you are going to move it to.

 If you plot on a SSD then copy the plot file over, it can make for very fast plotting.



 Pursuant to a previous comment - the FIRST time you plot an UNUSED Archive drive, it plots about as fast as a Compute 8TB drive - it doesn't slow down unless you have to REWRITE over existing data on the drive, THEN it gets a lot slower.
 First-time plot on a brand new never before used for anything else Archive 8TB drive I had went at about 140 meg/sec drive write speed - but I later shifted some plots to another drive and had to replot that Archive, at which point it dropped to more like 20 Meg/sec write speed.

 I suspect this would be similar for any other SMR type drive.