But if your only concern is how many watts your system is drawing, you could spin up 20 or 30 SSDs before they even got close to what a modern GPU consumes.
- Life on the Farm
- Hackaday
- Mining Protocols
- Proof of Work
- What’s chia, and why is it eating all the hard drives?
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Option Three.
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- Hard Drive Mining
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- Proof of Work
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- Proof of Stake
- Proof of Capacity
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- The first option.
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- What Is Crypto Mining?
- Second Option. Network-attached storage (NAS)
Life on the Farm
The term “mining” makes sense for Proof of Work cryptocurrencies, since you’re putting effort in to unlock something of value. But in the parlance of Chia, those looking to dedicate their storage space to the network are known as “farmers”; since after the initial setup, it essentially becomes a passive activity. The user simply tends their farm, which in this case means keeping an array of disk drives powered and properly maintained, and waits for something to sprout.
In a perfect world, you could simply point your Proof of Space software at an empty hard drive, and get credit for it. But in practice, such a simplistic system would be susceptible to fraud.
Hackaday
Depending on the mining protocol, the miner will require specialized hardware to perform the validation of transactions.
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Mining Protocols
A blockchain protocol, also known as a consensus method, is a system that manages how consensus is reached and validates transactions within a blockchain network. There are various types of protocols, some requiring physical mining equipment, while you just need to hold the coins in an active wallet.
Proof of Work
Proof of Work is a mining protocol, which is also used by cryptos, such as Bitcoin, that requires a lot of mining power in order to compute the algorithms.
What’s chia, and why is it eating all the hard drives?
You will have a really good network storage system that you can use for a home server or whatever it might be.
These come in all variations, this is 12 Bay. You may also want to consider the 8 Bay or the 6 Bay. Synology could be an ideal solution in some cases. If you have a plotter that has no capabilities for hard drive space and is pretty limited on USB ports this could be a good solution.
Option Three.
Solid State Drives.
This is what allows you to plot quickly and a certain number in parallel based on the storage capacity of the drives. So the example I’m going to start with Sabrent 2TB Rocket NVMe PCIe M.2 2280 we’re currently using (check price here).
This is not an enterprise drive but it’s fairly affordable, pretty available, and has a decent life expectancy for total writes. So overall, it’s not a bad solution.
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So here’s an example of an external hard drive that you can just plug into your computer and that’ll work just fine. There’s no special way to connect these drives to the computer. You don’t have to do anything special, just connect it.
So if you’re on a laptop or an all-in-one computer where you can’t access the insides and add drives to it, then this might be a good solution.
Now, if you have a hard drive and you need to connect it to a computer, but you don’t have the external hard drive enclosure, well, you can get one of these. And this is just going to plug into your computer via USB plug into some outlet, and then you just slide the hard drive in. So it’s basically going to work like an external hard drive thing, but it’ll allow you to easily remove that hard drive and take it to a different destination.
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Today, we will be looking into what hard drive mining is and how it works. Find out if this mining method is right for you.
Mining crypto is a process that involves validating the transactions made on the crypto’s blockchain, with the verified transactions then added to a new block. When a block is complete, another one is started, with the blocks being linked to each other.
A cryptocurrency miner races to be the first to find the solution to the complicated mathematical equations required to verify the transactions by using cryptographic hash functions.
The first miner who gets the code right becomes able to authorize the transaction. For his effort, he will receive the amount of coins released when a new block is discovered.
Hard Drive Mining
Hard drive mining is a way of creating new cryptos via the use of hard disk drives.
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Below are some of the most popular blockchain protocols:
Proof of Work
Proof of Work is a mining protocol that is computationally intensive. PoW mining requires powerful ASIC miners or graphic cards, but this depends on the mining difficulty of the network.
The higher the mining difficulty, the more powerful the hardware has to be.
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Such type of mining requires setting up physical hardware rigs made out of ASIC miners or graphic cards, depending on the mining difficulty of the network.
Proof of Stake
Proof of Stake does not require physical hardware; instead, producing new coins through staking, a process in which network users hold their coins and leave their computer on. Staking rewards are new coins generated by minimum computing power.
Proof of Capacity
Proof of Capacity is a consensus algorithm which instead of using ASICs computation to verify transactions, makes use of hard drives and storage. This is why this consensus model is used for hard drive mining.
This mining system consists of two parts: plotting and mining.
Plotting is when you generate a random solution, or a plot, via the Shabal cryptographic algorithm, that is then stored on the miner’s hard drive.
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It just ends up being a more scalable solution. Even if it costs a little bit more per terabyte it’s a better idea. For example, a Seagate Exos 16TB is a good idea unless you can find a higher capacity, like 18TB drives or 20TB or whatever else comes out in the future. 16TB is an all-around wise choice for today.
We need to get a hard drive full of plots and then connect it up to a computer to farm.
This is not a computationally expensive process. You just have to be able to connect it to the computer in some way.
So there are various ways to do this. If you have a desktop computer, well, then you can probably just open it up, attach it to the motherboard and attach it to the power supply. The complete hardware list can be found here.
So you have two simple options here.
The first option.
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In today’s guide, we will be explaining what hard drive mining is and what processes are involved when creating new cryptocurrencies through this alternative method.
What Is Crypto Mining?
Cryptocurrency mining, or cryptomining, is the process of validating the transactions that are made using a certain cryptocurrency before they are added to the block of the digital ledger.
A cryptocurrency miner verifies the authenticity of the transactions and updates the blockchain with the transaction. Cryptominers compete to solve complicated mathematical equations using cryptographic hash functions, as the first miner who cracked the code gets to authorize the transaction. In return for this, he is rewarded with a small amount of the new crypto.
You know, if you have a dedicated farmer and you’re just using some computers for plotting to these hard drives, well, in that situation, something like this might be useful. So 16-18TB HDDs and a USB 3.2 5-Bay 3.5 might be a good idea.
With 18TB, you can get like 72 terabytes of storage and that’s a pretty good option. This also comes in a five-bay variation and you can find other ones that support eight bays, for example.
I just have the case that stores a lot of hard drives and that’s how I manage all my hard drives.
And you might need two setups – one set up for the plotter, which puts plots on hard drives, and then a setup for a dedicated farmer, which may have access to a lot of hard drives.
Plotter rig setup can be found here.
For those of you who want to do 40 drives or more, you’re probably going to with something different like server HDD shelves with much bigger storage. That’s not a “home solution” and I guess you should know what you’re doing if you’re looking for such capacities.
Second Option. Network-attached storage (NAS)
If you’re somewhere in the middle, you know, maybe four drives aren’t quite enough, but you don’t really have 45 of them.
Then you can consider a NAS or network-attached storage, something like a Synology. This is the 12 Bay example. It’s a little on the pricey side, but it’s a really good piece of hardware. And a lot of people love these things, especially if you end up not doing Chia farming in the future.
