 So this side quest on our mining adventure was inspired by a post on the forums. One of our users, DreadcoreTV, is apparently considering buying a couple of 45 drive store-inators to mine Burstcoin, 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 iFixit. iFixit's ProTech 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 of Petabyte project to mine Burstcoin 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 Burstcoin doesn't benefit from, and their long-term reliability, which the Burstcoin community says shouldn't be affected much, but while mining Burstcoin is not as taxing as like a heavy load consisting of lots of writes 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 Storinator with like nothing in it that I haven't even touched since LimeTech was validating 4k native sector drives with Unraid, 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 because like they're 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. Now how am I going to get out of here? Okay, so let's get started then. If you want to mine Burstcoin, 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 backplane 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 Burstcoin 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 is that plotting drives takes forever. So in addition to my many core test bench, I've actually had like hard drive docs 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 XL60 Storinator 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 ultimate first coin mining setup. Look at this thing. I mean if the size of your d*** 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, we can just scooch over that. Yeah, no, it's fine. Well, yeah, sure. Okay. Thank you, that was the easy part. Now we gotta go get the other Storinator. God, this thing's heavy. Badminton's great for back strength. Floor. Thank you. Oh. Okay. So, by combining what's already good about the Storinator XL60, which is the low cost, I mean relatively speaking, and compact, relatively speaking, design that gives us 60 direct attach drives, with additional hardware capacity here in the back. For, check this out. Ah. A large EATX 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 four 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 in the other one. This will take a little bit. I really like what they've done with the new tool-less 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 into BurstCoin mining, is it worth it? And I'm going to have the answer for you in just a moment here. Let's get our freshly transplanted drives fired up in our OP system. And check this out. In the last about month or so with an average of about 150 terabytes of storage, we've mined 4,000 BurstCoin, which at today's price is a lot less than it sounds like. 3.2 cents US per burst. So I think we're up to about 160, 170 terabytes now. With the capacity we have and the average we've done over the last little bit, we'd mine about $100 of BurstCoin 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 ball-in storage device like a Storinator and a bunch of new, you know, helium-filled drives, opening up your own cloud storage service is probably a better bet. Speaking of running your own business, FreshBooks. FreshBooks is the cloud-based accounting solution for small business owners and freelancers. FreshBooks 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 client has seen your invoice putting an end to the guessing games. They've got fully featured apps for Android and iOS, allowing you to take the FreshBooks 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 FreshBooks, including their 24-7 customer support, for 30 days for nothing. Just go to freshbooks.com slash tech tips and enter Linus Tech Tips in the How Did You Hear About Us section. We're going to 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 disliked 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. I don't know, hard drives, maybe? We'll have that link below, store neaters, at the links in the video description. Also linked down there is our merch torch, has cool shirts like this one, and our community forum, which you should totally join.