Hello
I'm looking to start mining burst with some black friday HDD deals. On Amazon, the cheapest 8TB HDD is the seagate archive HDD.
The description says "The Seagate Archive HDD 8TB is a high capacity, energy efficient and lower cost hard drive for active archive purposes. The drive comes with impressive burst results but lower sustained write results, which are to be expected in this class of SMR drives."
Will these type of hard drives be suitable for mining with the poorer sustained write speeds? I guess plotting will be slow, but will mining or power consumption be affected? If not, which hard drives do you recommend? I'm only looking for 8tb HDDs due to limited space and a slight price premium to 3 or 4 tb drives is fine.
Secondly, about plot optimization. I read that to optimize a 4TB plot, you need 4TB of spare space. With a 8TB drive, does it mean I should plot 4TB, optimize that 4TB, then plot 2TB, optimize the 2TB and so on? Or perhaps do multiple 500GB/1TB plots?
Also, should a few percent of the drive be left empty, or is it all right to fill up every last byte of the drive?
I wish to get the best performance with the least power consumption/drive activity. Any advise to setup and optimize a 8TB drive is very appreciated.
Lastly, can I mine directly to Poloniex? It's less safe, but with just a few dollars in the account I prefer the convenience. Thanks guys.