Posts Tagged ‘Burst’

Building a Multi Terabyte Storage Solution for Mining and Sharing

28, Feb 2016

supermicro-file-storage-1

With different projects like Storj, Sia or Burst the use of hard drives and storage space tied to crypto currency mining or sharing files with crypto token rewards may become more attractive to users. With hard drive sizes growing and solutions available for building multi terabyte storage systems available building a multi-terabyte storage solution for use with the projects mentioned above might be viable. We’ve already covered a more affordable home user option for Building an 8 TB Storage Solution for Storj’s DriveShare, but there are options for much larger scale solutions that are still not too expensive, though probably still above the budget of the average home users. You need to look at more serious server companies for products that are designed for file servers for examples as we are going to be using a Supermicro solution for hosting 24 HDDs in a single rack-mountable chassis. The solution you are seeing here is not particularly designed for use with Burst, Sia or Storj, but we wanted to give it a try using it for them to get an idea what you may expect.

supermicro-file-storage-2

The 4U chassis used from Supermicro is designed for file servers in a rack-mountable format, supporting 24 3.5-inch hard drives, though the company offers many different products for 2.5 and 3.5-inch drives all the way up to 90 drives per system and apart from complete solutions you also have the option to go for HDD expanders for many drives that are being connected to separate systems. We have used 24 hard drives from Hitachi with a capacity of 6 TB which in theory should result in 144TB of storage space (in non RAID configuration with mirroring or spare drives), but in reality due to how HDD capacity is being calculated we are actually getting just 130 TB of usable space. For the purpose of the already mentioned crypto related projects you’d probably want to go for more space than redundancy, especially if you are building such a solution with that many hard drives.

supermicro-file-storage-3

Storj and Sia are supposed to ensure redundancy and data availability by replicating user stored data or multiple systems and for Burst that uses HDD space for mining you may just regenerate the plots in case you have a problem with any of the hard drives available. With Storj’s DriveShare you may have multiple drives shared, but with SIA or Burst you may have to do a HDD spanning configuration, so that all of the available space will be usable as a single drive. What you should be well aware of is the time it may take to fill up a very large space such as 130 TB with data using any of the projects. It will take literally days to generate HDD plots of that size for Burst mining, or to generate test data for the Storj DriveShare service as it currently does not store user data while still in testing phase. For Sia that already has an operating network and users are actually sharing data the waiting time to actually utilize that free space might take months and you needing to have a low price to attract more users. So at this point in time you probably can go with much smaller storage solutions and a 24-drive monster like this might be a bit overkill, especially considering the amount of money you will need to pay for the hardware and the expected ROI for using it as a mining medium or storage sharing solution that you get paid for. But then again, if you need to build one for different tasks and you have some free space on it you might want to give the three mentioned services a go…

Report on Mining Burst and Using SIA for 5 Days

6, Feb 2016

burst-mining-earnings

Earlier this week we have checked out the current status of Burst, an interesting altcoin that uses free HDD space for mining as well as started using SIA – a Blockchain-based cloud data storage service that has its own crypto currency token used to pay users sharing their free hard drive space (also mineable). So now it is time to share what we have earned or should earn for 5 days of mining Burst coins and sharing our free space using the Sia and also to compare to what we have earned as a rewards for testing the Storj DriveShare service that we have posted about yesterday.

We are starting with Burst, for 5 days mining the coin with 100 GB plot size (rather small) in a mining pool we have managed to earn a little short of 180 Burst coins. These coins are immediately available in our wallet once they are confirmed, unlike with DriveShare where rewards are currently distributed on a monthly basis for the previous month and when the contract ends for hosing files on Sia. Looking at the current exchange rate for Burst is 19 satoshi per coin, so for 5 days this means we have managed to mine just about 3420 satoshi. An estimate for 20 days based on these earnings in order to be able to compare to the earnings from Storj means we should expect to mine the Burst coin alternative of about 13680 satoshi. Just as a comparison, for 20 days sharing the same 100 GB size of data on the DriveShare in the current beta we have earned as a reward a little over 12 SJCX coins or about 115000 satoshi. So even with the not so high rewards in the current Storj DriveShare beta you can earn more than mining Burst with the same shared free space. The catch with Storj however is that you need to invest in at least 10000 SJCX coins and have them in your wallet in order to be eligible for receiving rewards.

sia-usage-earnings

Moving on to Sia that is similar to idea to Storj’s MetaDisk and DriveShare services, however unlike with Storj’s services Sia is already operational and you can purchase contracts ans share files or host files of other users and pay or get paid for your services. After 5 days of running the Sia wallet and client sharing 100 GB of free space on the network we are at an estimated 520 Sia coins to be earned once our current contracts are over. This is with a set price of 100 Sia coins per GB of space per month which is below the average usually floating in between 130-160 Sia coins per Gigabyte per month price that can even go up to about 200. The current price of Siacoin is about 7 satoshi or this means that when we fulfill our hosting contracts we would have earned 3640 satoshi for 5 fays or an estimate of about 14560 satoshi for 20 days in order to compare with the Storj rewards.

The catch with Sia is that even though we are sharing 100 GB of free space for 5 days we have managed to get contracts for hosting only about 3.5 GB of user data. Interestingly enough with just 3.5 GB we have managed to get an estimated earnings of slightly more than when mining for Burst coins, but still significantly less than we have earned from Storj’s DriveShare beta rewards. IF we multiply the rewards for the 3.5 GB shared data to estimate what would the full 100 GB earn if we have sold the full size result in about 14872 Siacoins in earnings. That would mean that for 20 days if we managed to immediately sell the full 100 GB free space that we decided to dedicate to Sia we could have earned nearly 105000 satoshi. This would be significantly more than form Burst, but still lower than the DriveShare rewards estimated for the same time and with the same amount of free space shared.

So it seems that Storj’s DriveShare beta service and the rewards that are being distributed for helping in testing and developing the service is more profitable at the current exchange rates and the potential for even more earnings s there once the service is ready for official launch. The drawback however is that you need to invest a significant amount in at least 1000 SJCX coins in order to be eligible for rewards. Also once again the service launches it may face the same problem as Sia at the moment – not enough users to quickly take up all of the offered free space by hosters. Sia has good potential to develop and compete with the likes of Storj, but it needs more users and needs to address some important things that we have covered in our initial impressions. The advantage that Sia has is that you are able to mine Siacoins in a more traditional way, however this also needs work as currently it is only solo mining and there are quite a few inconveniences present there as well.

Then comes Burst, it also needs more work to become more user friendly and easy to get into by novice users. Burst has a lot of extra features, however they are not that well described or easy to be used or whatever, making their presence insignificant if they do not attract users or are being used just by very few people. Then again you may also say that the coin is undervalued at the moment, another possibility that results in low profit for mining Burst at the moment…

Checking Out Burst, the HDD Mined Cryptocurrency

31, Jan 2016

burst-local-wallet-windows-client

It has been over a year and a half since we’ve initially checked the Burst altcoin that you mine with a hard drive, so we’ve decided to revisit what has happened since. The Burst crypto currency uses a new algorithm for proof of HDD capacity (POC) mining, so it needs a lot of hard drive space – the more, the better and more coins you should be able to mine. One of the reasons that we wanted to check the coin out again was the availability of a Windows Wallet Client that is supposed to integrate everything in a single user friendly package that is easy even for novice miners to get started. So we have started fro the beginning downloading everything we need, generating a new wallet address, plotting 100GB for mining and trying out the CPU and GPU assisted mining software…

Unfortunately we’ve had some trouble along the way, like the lack of a default Java-based wallet config file for the local Burst wallet (apparently not included in the client package version 0.2) that was resulting in a weird error from the Java when trying to run the local wallet (we have Java installed and working properly, but the wallet is crashing with unexpected error because the config file is simply missing in the official zipped release of the GUI wallet, so it took us some time to figure out the cause of the error). Downloading the complete Burst blockchain can take a while as it is getting close to 2.5 GB already, though you can make it faster by downloading a zipped version and adding it to the local wallet. Generating plot files on the hard drives is also a process that takes quite some time, even for a relatively small 100 GB size it could take a while, let alone for large terabyte plots. We’ve also had trouble getting the GPU assisted miner working, though the CPU one apparently works just fine. You should try mining on a pool as solo mining is probably pretty pointless with such a high difficulty, but even on a pool with a small plot size it might not be worth the effort to start mining at all, so go for it only if you have a lot of free HDD space in the range of Terabytes, not Gigabytes.

In the end, if you still haven’t gotten into Burst, then it most likely it is late to do so now. There is an improvement since we’ve last tried it, however we don’t think it is enough, especially on the user friendliness front and that is an important thing if you want to attract more new users and miners especially. Still, if you have some significant amount of free HDD space and what to try mining a crypto currency that does not require much of a CPU or GPU resources, then you can check Burst out. Another alternative for making money out of your free HDD space could be Storj’s DriveShare when it launches officially, hopefully later this year, so if you are in for the profit you might skip that one as well. For now we are probably going to stick for a while longer testing the DriverShare beta, but more out of curiosity as it is not very profitable and requires a significant initial investment in order to be eligible for rewards, instead of trying to mine Burst coins. Some good places to trade Burst include Bittrex, Stex and Livecoin.

– For more information about the Burst crypto currency with Proof of Capacity HDD mining…


top