Mining: once plots are generated and stored on a drive, the miner only has to launch his mining software. It will read through his plots in order to come up with an amount of time (called the “deadline“) necessary to forge the current block. Once the deadline is submitted, the HDD becomes idle until the next block appears. Your HDD stays idle most of the time and reads through the plot files only for a few seconds for each block. The best deadline submitted among all miners is the one forging and establishing the duration of the block.