Gadgetory

so this side quest on our mining adventure was inspired by a post on the forums one of our users Dredd core TV is apparently considering buying a couple of 45 drives for inators - mine burst coin 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 I fix it I fix its protec 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 okay so jake has been bugging me to use the inactive half a petabyte project to mine bursts 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 bursts coin doesn't benefit from and their long-term reliability which the burst coin community says shouldn't be affected much but while mining burst coin 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 story inator with like nothing in it that I haven't even touched since lime tech was validating 4k native sector drives with unread 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 cuz like their 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 how am I gonna get out of here okay so let's get started then if you want a mind 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 back plane 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 it turns out that update number one that wadding 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 excel 60-story inator 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 our ultimate first coin mining setup look at this thing I mean if the size of you was correlated with the size of your storage server mine would be a lot bigger than it really is I don't think this was specific for us no just I we can just screw children okay thank you that was the easy part now we got to go get the other story god this badminton is great for back strings floor thank you so by combining what's already good about the store Nader Excel 60 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 a large e ATX 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 for 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 and the other one this'll take a little bit I really like that they've done with the new tool this mechanism it's got these kind of 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 in to 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 Opie system and check this out in the last about months or so with an average of about a hundred and fifty terabytes of storage we've mined four thousand burst coin which at today's price is a lot less than it sounds like point three point two cents US per burst so with I think we're up to about a hundred and sixty hundred and seventy terabytes now with the capacity we have and the average we've done over the last little bit weed 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 ballin storage device like a store inator and a bunch of new you know helium-filled drives opening up your own cloud storage services probably a better bet speaking of running your own business fresh books fresh books is the cloud-based accounting solution for small business owners and freelancers fresh books 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 clients has seen your invoice putting it into the guessing games they've got fully featured apps for Android and iOS allowing you to take the fresh books 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 first books comm slash tech tips and enter Linus tech tips in the how did here 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 if you guys just like 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 no no hard drives maybe you'll have that link below store Nader's at the links in the video description also link down there is our merch torch as cool shirts like this one and our community forum which you should totally join