You guys are terribly late, burst was insanely profitable ~8-6 months ago (like ROI in 20 days profitable) but quickly dropped off once more people caught on, right now its totally meh. On the bright side - the mining itself doesn't really burn the HDD's, they are written full just once and after that its read-only, you can sell off the drives as almost new even after years of mining.
As for the HDD prices going up because of this - they already did, you just didn't notice because you weren't paying attention. All the 5tb+ drives took a 50% price hike when it was popular, hasn't dropped off since then.
Burst was the first coin I mined when I got into crypto as I had an extra HD laying around that was 4 TB, I made like a couple hundred bucks in a few months by holding until the altcoin craze, sold at a little below the ATH. I stopped with Burstcoin cause the community started to seem shady, some guys that were heavily involved in promoting it, at least.
HOWEVER, I recently saw that Burstcoin is using some new mining mechanism, or a new plotter or something, (don't quote me, this is just off the top of my head), something has been recently revamped, may be worth looking into. And also, I may have made a snap judgement with thinking the promoters were shady, the coin's devs from what I read the other night seem to actually be dedicated, but again my research was minimal.
In my mind, if anything is worth some satoshi, and it's not causing you to be in the red, and you can hold, it can be worth it, but that's a risk. And also gotta think about the time you invest. It's kinda more a hobby type of thing for me. I also have seen really cheap 4-8 TB drives lately, so maybe b/c of the drop and the rise in difficulty is why the prices of HDD went down? I dunno, but honestly I think it's good to mess around with, not sure if it'll be profitable.
I almost forgot the point of my post - yes, that I recently read some new developments within burstcoin that was changing things up a bit ....
