The crypto boom led to an inevitable shortage of video cards in some world regions, as enthusiastic miners went on a panic-buying spree. However, today the market is forecasting an acute shortage of HDD and SSD due to a new crypto player – the Chia token, which can be mined using hard drives.
Crypto fans decided to turn to crypto mining on their own equipment, as it doesn’t require large energy costs. And although mining on hard drives is not as popular as mining on video cards or ASICs, it allows to get coins without noise and dust, as well as without the round-the-clock hum of coolers.
Today we will tell you how to mine cryptocurrency on HDD and SSD, which models are suitable for mining, how to mine Chia cryptocurrency step by step, and how to calculate the benefits of this process.
General principles of hard drive mining
All miners remember January 2021, when video cards ran out on retail shelves. Then many wondered: what else can you mine on, besides the GPU?
And here the Proof-of-Capacity (PoC) algorithm, created in 2014, crossed the minds. It marked the beginning of a new type of crypto mining on hard drives.
The peculiarity of the PoC algorithm is the use of unnecessary physical memory of the device. Solutions for generating a new block in the blockchain are recorded on the free drive space, which triggers mining on HDD.
The mining community calls this process "plotting". A plot is a piece of memory on a device to store Chia or another currency. Once placed, it must be “cultivated”. The cultivation or plotting process involves expanding the plot to a certain size.
Thanks to the PoC algorithm, the developers have significantly reduced the power consumption of mining. Moreover, hard drives don’t require large investments, which is especially important in the context of fluctuating crypto rates.
Compared to GPU mining, HDD farms are characterized by:
easy setup that doesn’t require special knowledge.
But, of course, there are also negative aspects. The first and most important is the small number of available crypto coins. Today, you can mine Chia, Burst, Sia, Storj, and FileCoin on your hard drive. And the list ends there.
Moreover, a hard drive is not everlasting, it tends to wear out. But at the same time, a used hard drive is more difficult to sell than a video card.
And yet many people, despite the shortcomings, delve into mining on HDD and SSD.
What hard drives are suitable for mining?
When choosing a hard drive, it is important to pay attention to several parameters:
The amount of internal memory of the drive. This factor directly affects the level of mining profitability: the more memory, the higher the profit.
Spindle speed. This setting affects how quickly the computer can retrieve data from the hard drive.
The most suitable drives for mining cryptocurrencies today are:
Toshiba HDWD130EZSTA
Seagate ST8000 AS0002
Western Digital WD Red
Seagate ST10000 VN0004
Memory: 3 TB
Spindle speed: 7200 RPM
Cache: 64 MB
Cost: ~$100
Memory: 8 TB
Spindle speed: 7200 RPM
>
Cache: 256 MB
Cost: ~$155
Memory: 6 TB
Spindle speed: 7200 RPM
Cache: 64 MB
Cost: ~$250
Memory: 10 TB
Spindle speed: 7200 RPM
Cache: 256 MB
Cost: ~$500
How to mine Chia on HDD and SSD in 2021?
To mine Chia coin, you need to go through four main steps.
Step 1: Install Chia program
To find the program you need, go to the Chia official website and download the latest blockchain version. Don't panic if the process takes a long time.
After installation, create your own wallet, which will store Chia you mined. Select Generate New Private Key and 24 words will appear on the screen. Be sure to write them down and keep them in a safe place, as this phrase is used to access your wallet.
Stage 2: Start forming the plot
Go to the “Plots” tab and click the “Add a plot” button. To form one plot, you need 356.5 GB of free hard disk space. Wait for the process’s completion.
Stage 3. Start blockchain synchronization
After you have formed the plot, the synchronization of the Chia blockchain begins. And again you have to wait.
Stage 4. Start farming
Farming (as the project founders call the mining of the XCH cryptocurrency) will start automatically after synchronization.
It’s worth noting that with two drives and one plot, the production of one XCH coin can take from 2 to 8 years. So using a primitive computer assembly is pointless.
The main goal of Chia farming is to build plots in parallel. To get a tangible profit, a miner needs to optimize his equipment to create the maximum number of plots. In this case, one can be built for about 3-4 hours.
You can estimate how much XCH you can earn with a given hard drive using Chia calculator.
When using a calculator, the units of measure may seem strange to you. MiB (mebibyte) and GiB (gibibyte) are based on the degree of two rather than ten. Therefore, a mebibyte is 1,048,576 bytes, and a gibibyte is approximately 1.07 gigabytes. Without going into details, the values given in MiB and GiB are slightly higher than GB and MB.
Profitability from hard drives mining
Now the payback of hard drive mining is almost negligible and is interesting to users who hope for coin’s large-scale growth.
So, with the current price of assets and the purchase of hard drives for $2000, you will be able to recoup your costs only in 3 years. Every 3 TB of free space on the HDD will bring about $9-10 per month.
It’s simply impossible to talk about some kind of extra-profitability with such numbers unless you got a bunch of hard drives for free.
Final words
Mining on a hard drive requires smaller investments since an HDD or SSD is much cheaper than an ASIC or a video card. Mining on hard drives also doesn’t require complex cooling systems and removal of hot air from the room, and, of course, it consumes less electricity.
However, this process has several drawbacks. First, there is a limited number of coins to mine. Second, used hard drives are much more difficult to sell. And sometimes their further sale is simply impossible since the high mining load leads to their premature failure. For example, Chia's continuous farming cuts the shelf life of a 512GB hard drive from 5 years to 40 days.
Summing up, it should be said that mining on HDD and SSD will be profitable only in a few years when this method gains momentum. At this stage of development, plotting cryptocurrency using hard drives will not bring tangible income.
HDD Mining, also known as "storage mining", is the process of obtaining encrypted currency based on hard disk storage. Unlike traditional mining based on graphics processing units (also known as GPU mining), hard disk miners use hard disks to generate new data blocks in the distributed ledger and receive rewards.
With today's difficulty rate but much more advanced systems, it may take a solo miner about 10 minutes to mine one bitcoin. The average rate for most miners, however, stands at 30 days.
The good news is that, for a mining rig, you don't need to buy an SSD with huge amounts of storage, which means it's not too difficult to keep the prices low. We recommend an SSD for mining with a minimum capacity of 120GB for Windows installs, or even as low as 60GB if you're going to run Linux.
For mining ethereum, we recommend using an Intel Celeron or Intel i3 processor. RAM — Higher RAM does not mean that you get a better mining performance, so we recommend using anywhere between 4GB and 16GB of RAM.
What is a USB Bitcoin miner? It is a tiny device you can plug into your PC or laptop to start mining Bitcoin. This USB stick is essentially a mini mining rig that can increase the processing power and hashrate of your computer. Hashrate is a computational unit used to measure the speed of mining.
It takes an estimated 1,449 kilowatt hours (kWh) of energy to mine a single bitcoin. That's the same amount of energy an average U.S. household consumes in approximately 13 years. Given the high amount of energy needed to mine bitcoin, it can be a costly venture to get into.
How much energy does mining take? The Digiconomist's Bitcoin Energy Consumption Index estimated that one bitcoin transaction takes 1,449 kWh to complete, or the equivalent of approximately 50 days of power for the average US household.
Bitcoin mining can be a lucrative way to make money with Bitcoin, but not for individual investors. Because of the computing power required, the upfront and ongoing costs can far outpace mining rewards earned.
While mining Bitcoin now requires large warehouses of powerful mining machines, you can still use the processing power of your personal computer's CPU or GPU to generate smaller cryptos like Shiba Inu.
Do you need a powerful computer for bitcoin mining? You can use a standard computer with a CPU, motherboard, RAM, and storage. However, the most important thing is the graphics processing unit (GPU) or the video card. In this regard, a high-performance GPU is a critical component if you want to mine cryptocurrency.
Many people wonder how many Bitcoins can be mined by a person in a day. There are currently 6.25 bitcoins produced in each block, and a block is produced every 10 minutes. This means that there are 6.25 (Bitcoins per block) x 6 (blocks per hour) x 24 (hours per day) = 900 bitcoins produced each day.
Depending on the coin, you will either need an ASIC miner (computer exclusively designed for mining specific coins) or a PC with a powerful GPU (graphics card) or CPU (processor) in some cases.
A USB Bitcoin miner looks like an easy way to get into mining. USB miners have too little hashrate and too low efficiency to be competitive. USB miners cannot realistically be profitable.
Assuming you have free electricity (a single solar panel can easily power an efficient Linux computer with a USB-based Bitcoin miner), you can expect to make $0.02 per day at most. At this rate, it would take you the entire year to mine 0.0003 worth of BTC.
You may already have assumed that using something as simple as a USB drive to mine probably won't provide the highest profits. But don't be so quick to disregard this mining method. In January 2022, a solo Bitcoin miner made a net profit of $215,000 via USB mining.
Bitcoin mining fees will disappear when the Bitcoin supply reaches 21 million. Miners will likely earn income only from transaction processing fees, rather than a combination of block rewards and transaction fees. PlanetCrypto. "How Many Bitcoin Are Left in 2022?"
Bitcoin pays out a mining reward each time a new “block” is entered into the permanent record of transactions. The reward shrinks every few years, but for now, it is 6.25 BTC, which in December 2022 was worth roughly $105,000 as Bitcoin hovered below $17,000.
It takes around 10 minutes to mine just one Bitcoin, though this is with ideal hardware and software, which isn't always affordable and only a few users can boast the luxury of. More commonly and reasonably, most users can mine a Bitcoin in 30 days.
So far, over 19 million bitcoins are in existence - with the last one being mined in 2140. Once all 21 million have been mined, there will be no more new Bitcoins created. Miners are rewarded with a certain number of bitcoins for each block they successfully mine.
After 210,000 blocks, the reward is cut in half, known as a “halving” event. The impact of a halving event is significant as miners immediately lose half of their revenue from block rewards.
The appeal of crypto's promise to reinvent money has reached its limit in a very niche audience. After hitting all-time highs in 2021, cryptocurrency prices haven't found a definitive floor. And the appeal of crypto's promise to reinvent money has also reached its limit in a very niche audience.
While mining bitcoin on an individual computer is no longer viable, there are other cryptocurrencies that you can still mine at home if you're prepared to put in the effort. Updated 12th October 2022.
Regarding all BTC mining websites, StormGain is the most user-friendly and most suited for newcomers. This platform has a one-click mining process that uses no local resources and is free. It is possible to do anything here: buy, sell, trade, and mine! Only Bitcoin can be mined on StormGain servers.
Daily Profit = ($2,250 / Year ) x 365 Days in a year = $727.5 per day. If a mining rig costs around $8,000, then you'll need to invest around $8k in order to mine 1 Bitcoin in one year. Mining will still be very profitable in a few years. In fact, we believe that it'll be even more profitable than it is today.
Answer: Monero is the easiest cryptocurrency to mine now because it can be mined via browser extensions and free software over websites. It is even mined via crypto jacking. The mining code can also easily be incorporated into apps and websites to facilitate mining.
Bitcoin. If you have the capital and are willing to put the effort, Bitcoin (BTC) continues to be the number one choice amongst cryptocurrency miners across the world. ...
Q #2) How long does it take to mine 1 Ethereum? Answer: It takes around 7.5 days to mine Ethereum as of September 13, 2021, at the hash rate or hashing power of 500 mh/s with an NVIDIA GTX 3090 that hashes at around 500MH/s. With a GPU that hashes at around 28.2 MH/S, it should take much longer.
27, the estimated daily profit for an Ethereum miner using a single GPU was $4.59. For Feathercoin, by way of comparison, miners were estimated to lose $0.58 per day. Obviously, to generate a significant amount of profit, you'd need to host a large number of GPUs using these calculations.
What Are Crypto Mining Apps? Just as there are lots of bitcoin casino sites, there are also lots of different crypto mining apps. These apps allow you to use your phone or tablet's processing power to mine for various cryptocurrencies, such as Bitcoin, Litecoin, Dogecoin, and more.
Mining crypto at home with a CPU is possible with coins like Monero, Zcash and Byte, but it will be a slow process and the cost of electricity may be more than the value of the coins you can mine. For those who want to get more serious, crypto GPU mining is a realistic path.
Bitcoin, Ethereum, or other cryptocurrencies mined as a hobby is reported on your Form 1040 Schedule 1 on Line 8 as “other Income.” It is taxed at your income bracket's tax rate . This approach to mining taxes is the simplest. However, hobby mining is not eligible for business deductions.
Yes!Crypto, especially bitcoin mining, is still profitable in 2022. It might seem a little complicated now, but everything will eventually fall into place. Since Bitcoin price impacts all miners, here are three factors you can exploit to make you a profitable miner in 2022.
You need to factor in the fact that mining is usually a 24/7 process, and you're putting a lot of unneeded stress on your laptop. Not only can you damage your GPU in the long run, but you can also wear out the teeny tiny fans, which can further complicate things.
Yes, you can, but you have to keep a couple of things in mind. Firstly, don't expect any noticeable income from mining on a laptop. Secondly, laptops, by design, are not suitable for crypto mining, and prolonged mining will cause damage to the device.
To start, you can download one of various crypto mining software programs that will mine on your PC's central processing unit (CPU). This doesn't require any investment in a GPU or a specialized mining rig. Be sure to do your own research and verify that the software comes from a reputable source.
At least one specialized computer (called an Application-specific Integrated Circuit or ASIC miner), which is specifically designed to compete for and support a particular cryptocurrency.
For starters, graphics cards on mining rigs work 24 hours a day. That takes up a lot more power than browsing the internet. A rig with three GPUs can consume 1,000 watts of power or more when it's running, the equivalent of having a medium-size window AC unit turned on.
How Much Does a Mining Rig Cost? A typical ASIC mining rig can cost anywhere between $2,000 and $20,000. That is a broad range and it does not tell the full story of the quality of the product. It is important to understand that the price of a mining rig is not the only factor when buying a miner.
Introduction: My name is Stevie Stamm, I am a colorful, sparkling, splendid, vast, open, hilarious, tender person who loves writing and wants to share my knowledge and understanding with you.
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