HDD mining is really not the exact word that describes what HDD do in process.
All HDD mineable coins are POC coins, or Proof of Capacity, not POW as some people think.
In my article I am going to cover two coins I’ve personally got involved mining:
-Burst
-Storj
Well first of all for all of you who think that hardware requirements are very low for this type of mining, Burst is here to prove us wrong.
To set up Burst you’ll need a decent CPU with lots of cores, motherboard with lots of sata ports or usb ports if you prefer external HDDS.
When preparing your HDDs for bursting first you need to plot them using plotting software which is built in burst wallet.
Process of plotting HDD is very time consuming depending heavily on your hardware – CPU and GPU.
Yes you can plot HDD with your GPU and it’ll take around 6 hours to plot 500 GB, for reference my Intel dual core CPU was plotting 500GB 7 days.
After HDDs have been plotted you can start bursting on pool, its not power consuming but it’s a little bit noisy from the sound of spinning iron, especially if you have 7200 or higher RPM drives.
Storj on other hand is a little less demanding on hardware, it requires 2-4 GB of RAM per node and 1 CPU core, ether logical or virtual.
Storj has a good potential, and while is very easy to setup in windows or linux it is very silent in terms of HDD use. With storj you’re basically renting your HDD space to various cloud services and get reward based on many parameters such as network used, amount of data, time online, etc…
Storj is ER20 ETH token so you can bind payouts to your ETH address, very convenient.
Team has changed payment method from march 2018 and now payouts are not monthly they are volatile, and seems like storj is having some issues with manipulating fixed node payout, as people tend to exploit that and run as many unnecessary nodes regardless of hdd space.
There are also Sia coin that performs in a same manner as storj, but I haven’t got into it since I’ve read that it’s not profitable.
Generally all POC coins tends to draw your internet bandwith, both upload and download, so be aware of that before you get involved in this type of mining.
Considering profitability of POC coins – they have great potential in future and let’s just say I’m with them for the technology – not for the profit.
