Back around the 4th of July Best Buy had a sale on 8TB Western Digital EasyStore external hard drives. So I thought about it and decided it was time to shrink the burstcoin rig and just make it simpler. Around the beginning on the year I had got a Lenovo Thinkcentre M93p (AKA Lenovo Tiny) for free and was using it as my desktop computer. So with the sale from best buy and the Lenovo Tiny in hand, I decided to shrink the overkill 13 drive rig down to a Tiny 3 drive set up.

Meet the Lenovo Tiny

This unit has the extra DVD drive add-on. In this day and age I do not need a DVD drive but, the DVD drive provide 2 extra USB 3.0 ports on the back. This may come in handy down the line if I buy more USB drives for Burstcoin Mining.

Either way here is the system specs for the Lenovo Thinkcentre M93p

CPU: Intel Core i5 4570T

RAM: 4GBs RAM

HD: 500 Samsung 850 EVO 500GB

The first thing i did when I got this machine was the 500 GB mechanical drive was replaced with a Samsung 850 EVO SSD.

The one limitation of this system is that it only has 4GBs of RAM, but ram is cheap and there is a good chance I may be able to get a stick of RAM for this system for free from work so I won’t worry too much.

This is an older model Lenovo Tiny but, the form factor is still a current platform from Lenovo and I highly recommend them if you don’t need a dedicated graphics card. Check out the current line up here.

With this machine the 2 major improvements are:

Power consumption

AVX2

The CPU on this machine maxes out at 35 watts which is way lower the i7-950 (130 watts) I was using. Is almost 100 watts of power savings right off the bat. On top of that this CPU supports AVX2 so I don’t need the over kill video card to get decent mining speeds. Now my R9 270 can go back to doing something useful like gaming or a triple monitor set up.

I plotted all 3 8TB drives in about ~6 days using turbo plotter and a spare SSD drive.





In the picture you can see the 3 USB3 drives and the SSD i used in turbo plotter. I’m leaving it connected for know just in case there is a good sale with back to school time or something.

Either way this is how the performance looks.

With the way these drives perform I should be able to add another 3 drives before I max out the I/O of USB 3.0, maybe even 4. I know the picture says there is 8 GBs of ram in the system. I recently upgraded the system with an extra 4GB stick. But when I started mining on this machine I only had 4 GBs of ram.

So at the end of the day, I’m happy that I have a simplified Burstcoin rig with a little more space, that mines better, and for less energy then mining rig 1.0/1.5. Please feel free to look at this systems the old rig here.

-T