ASUS, after numerous leaks, has finally introduced the ROG Phone 6D and 6D Ultimate gaming flagship smartphones. These are analogues of previous versions of ROG Phone 6…
HDD and SSD Shortage Due to Miners – Likely Scenario
Butcher79
Cryptocurrency mining has made it extremely difficult to obtain an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 30-series or AMD Radeon RX 6000-series card. Hard drives and solid state drives may be the next component to face shortages.
According to the latest report HKEPC , an emerging cryptocurrency Chia is mined using disk space, and miners in China are buying up hard drives and solid state drives at an alarming rate.
New cryptocurrency, Chia Coin, is forcing miners to buy HDDs and SSDs at an alarming rate
The new Chia cryptocurrency is unlikely to rely on hard drive and SSD storage space. Bitcoin relies on a proof-of-work model, while Chia relies on a space-time proof-of-work model. The motivation for creating Chia was to create a more environmentally friendly cryptocurrency. Chia is backed by Bram Cohen, the creator of BitTorrent, and he wants to use the available space on storage devices for his cryptocurrency, as SSDs and hard drives use less power, are cheaper and more affordable compared to power-hungry and hard GPUs used for Ethereum mining .
According to the report, miners have seen the emergence of this new cryptocurrency and are going to buy all the storage devices they can, even if it is not yet up for auction. The Chia mining process requires a lot of free space and performs a lot of reads and writes. In this case, durability is just as important as speed, so consumer SSDs are not the best choice for mining due to their lower endurance, and performing these operations will significantly reduce the life of the SSD. The target of these miners are hard drives and solid state drives for data centers.
These miners buy a huge amount of hard drives ranging from 4TB to 18TB. In the Hong Kong area, this resulted in an expected increase in prices from HK$200 ($26) to HK$600 ($76). In the report MyDriversJiahe Jinwei, a major SSD manufacturer in China, has revealed that all of its 2TB and 1TB Gloway and Asgard high-performance NVMe M.2 SSDs are out of stock. He also mentioned that he is taking steps to prevent miners from buying a large number of consumer SSDs, as well as increasing their supply and developing drives for mining.
If the new eco-friendly Chia Coin is successful, we may face hard drive and SSD shortages. Even though SSDs won't be very efficient, less informed buyers will buy them to capitalize on the new cryptocurrency. This can later be questioned when buying used SSDs, as repeated reads and writes will greatly reduce the life of an SSD.
Was the article helpful?
