I always just brought 2+ mining turtle's with me and set the off with the tunneling program with a 2 block distance between the tunnels. Easy mode diamonds and other resources.
IIRC Energy is lost depending on the distance it has to travel.
Furthermore Combustion Engines shouldn't blow up as long as they have sufficient cooling.
It is in the performance section of Win8s task manager, you can also use the processes section and highlight 'disk 0' to sort the processes by how much disk resources they are using.