In our time, the trend is crypto currency trading on video cards, and another surge of interest in blocking technology has led to a severe shortage of video cards and power supplies of medium and high price range due to the high demand among the miners. Therefore, in place of expensive equipment, an alternative type of crypto-currency extraction has come, namely, mining on HDD hard disks. The cost of hard drives is not high, and the amount of memory is quite increased.
What is mining on hard drive (HDD)?
Mining on a hard disk is a way of mining a crypto currency, which gained popularity against the backdrop of a shortage of video cards and motherboards. To drive on the HDD, a simple computer with standard parameters and a built-in graphics card is enough. At the same time, the volume of containers should be solid, because the efficiency of such production does not depend on the number of devices, only the total amount of memory is important.
The pioneer of mining on the hard drive is the BURST crypto currency, and you can also drop Storj or Sia.
If we talk about the advantages of HDD mining, it is:
- Cheap assembly (to build a farm of disks, it is much easier than to purchase expensive video cards)
- Cheap accessories
- Simple settings, even new, everything is quite easy to assemble and easy to set up for crypto currency production
- Minimum space – a small farm, can be assembled in a simple ATX package
- Low power consumption (for example, 5 hard disks, consume about 50W)
- Low heat dissipation, which ensures no noise, no cost for powerful coolers
- There are no difficulties in preparing, as with the farms on the video card (you do not need to be a specialist in computer technology)
But, do not think that HDD mining is the ideal budget and efficient way to extract crypto currency. He has his own significant shortcomings:
- A small number of coins for the possibility of extraction
- Less life of hard disks than graphics cards (approximately 10,000 hours)
- Low cost of the possible extracted crypto currency, but the price is gradually increasing.
- HDD badly sold in the secondary market
How to choose a hard drive for mining?
When selecting equipment, focus on two main criteria – the amount of memory and the cost of the selected model. The smaller the price will be 1 GB of hard drive, the lower costs are expected by the miner. No less important parameter is reliability. As a rule, modern hard drives have approximately the same level with fluctuations in the minimum range.
Quite popular and most suitable for many ratings for mining are such HDD models: Toshiba HDWD 130EZSTA 3Tb, Seagate ST8000 AS0002 8Tb, Western Digital WD Red (WD60EFRX) 6Tb, HGST HUH721010 ALE604 10Tb.
Is it possible to make money on this?
Really calculate the profitability is difficult, because the course of coins is constantly changing. If you compare the efficiency of mining on graphics cards and on HDD, then the speed of coin mining and payback of mining on the GPU is more profitable. But in the process of calculations it is necessary to take into account the cost of electricity and the actual cost of equipment.
The power consumption of a hard drive is smaller, but it’s still more profitable to work on a GPU, because it’s faster to recoup costs. On average, the return on all equipment purchased for Burst production is about 2 years.
The main benefit of extracting virtual coins on the hard drive is the ease of assembly, configuration and activation of the finished farm. There is no need to buy high-power power units and a lot of adapters, as well as pile complex metal structures.