New cryptocurrency Chia blamed for hard drive shortages

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Oh great. Not content with using vast amounts of energy and buying up all the GPUs, some genius has devised a 'greener' cryptocurrency that needs vast amounts of hard disk space instead. And, surprise surprise, speculators are buying up all the drives. Need a 16TB hard disk in a hurry? Good luck with that.
www.theguardian.com

New cryptocurrency Chia blamed for hard drive shortages

Speculators buy up vital components as demand surges for rival to bitcoin that requires huge storage space
www.theguardian.com www.theguardian.com
foreignpolicy.com

Chia Is a New Way to Waste Resources for Cryptocurrency

What Bitcoin does for electricity and Ethereum for video cards, Chia does for hard disks.
foreignpolicy.com foreignpolicy.com
'During the COVID-19 pandemic, manufacturing supply chains were already disrupted in multiple industries, leading to shortages of many basic components. By April, just a month after it was launched, chia farmers were straining the hard disk market, with reports from Hong Kong of large disks, over 4 terabytes, having tripled in price. Hard disk shortages and price rises were reported across Southeast Asia and in the United States. Chia’s initial plotting process is usually done on a solid-state drive (SSD), such as you’d find in a desktop or laptop. In normal usage, a modern SSD will last over a decade; an SSD that’s plotting chia may burn out in less than six weeks. SSD manufacturers are now refusing to honor warranties on SSDs used for crypto mining. Secondhand SSDs and hard disks manufactured since 2021 can no longer be trusted not to be burnt-out wrecks. In Germany, the popular cloud service Hetzner has banned chia farming. Instead of carbon dioxide, Chia produces vast quantities of e-waste—rare metals, assembled into expensive computing components, turned into toxic near-unrecyclable landfill within weeks.'

Or more succintly:
View: https://BANNED/endocrimes/status/1386081412638466057
 
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Retune said:
Oh great. Not content with using vast amounts of energy and buying up all the GPUs, some genius has devised a 'greener' cryptocurrency that needs vast amounts of hard disk space instead. And, surprise surprise, speculators are buying up all the drives. Need a 16TB hard disk in a hurry? Good luck with that.

www.theguardian.com

New cryptocurrency Chia blamed for hard drive shortages

Speculators buy up vital components as demand surges for rival to bitcoin that requires huge storage space
www.theguardian.com www.theguardian.com
Click to expand...

:banghead: the world is going bonkers :mad::bat:
 
If i want a 16TB I can simply buy 4x4TB drives and then RAID 0 them on my HP Z840.
The advantage is approximately a 3-4x the normal speed.
I have 2TBd disks (4x500MB) on 2 of my Z800 workstations running at over 400Mb/sec.
The advantages are obvious and I can also use them as boot drives if I wish - I have 128GB partitioned as a boot drive on one workstation.
And of course vastly cheaper than an SSD running at that speed.
 
petersmart said:
If i want a 16TB I can simply buy 4x4TB drives and then RAID 0 them on my HP Z840.
The advantage is approximately a 3-4x the normal speed.
I have 2TBd disks (4x500MB) on 2 of my Z800 workstations running at over 400Mb/sec.
The advantages are obvious and I can also use them as boot drives if I wish - I have 128GB partitioned as a boot drive on one workstation.
And of course vastly cheaper than an SSD running at that speed.
Click to expand...

Obviously when you do that you run a much greater risk of total data failure. Depending on what the data is and your backup position this could be a very serious reason against such a setup. Most NAS drives have some sort of mirrored array rather than aggregating space
 
LongLensPhotography said:
Obviously when you do that you run a much greater risk of total data failure. Depending on what the data is and your backup position this could be a very serious reason against such a setup. Most NAS drives have some sort of mirrored array rather than aggregating space
Click to expand...
Well data loss is always a possibility and obviously I back up all important data, but I've never had a problem with such an arrangement.
All important data is backed up to external drives and also to the cloud.
 
petersmart said:
If i want a 16TB I can simply buy 4x4TB drives and then RAID 0 them on my HP Z840.
The advantage is approximately a 3-4x the normal speed.
I have 2TBd disks (4x500MB) on 2 of my Z800 workstations running at over 400Mb/sec.
The advantages are obvious and I can also use them as boot drives if I wish - I have 128GB partitioned as a boot drive on one workstation.
And of course vastly cheaper than an SSD running at that speed.
Click to expand...

That's great if you only need 16TB, but if you were buying 16TB drives to build into an array... less useful.

RAID0 is living a bit close to the edge for most corporate purposes. Some variant of RAID5 is much more palatable.

Also, RAID arrays of spinning disks are great for sequential read and write, but there aren't any mechanical disks that will meet the responsiveness and seek times of modern SSDs, which is much more useful in a boot disk application.
 
miker said:
That's great if you only need 16TB, but if you were buying 16TB drives to build into an array... less useful.

RAID0 is living a bit close to the edge for most corporate purposes. Some variant of RAID5 is much more palatable.

Also, RAID arrays of spinning disks are great for sequential read and write, but there aren't any mechanical disks that will meet the responsiveness and seek times of modern SSDs, which is much more useful in a boot disk application.
Click to expand...

What you said about boot times is quite true.

For booting I usually use a mSATA SSD mounted on an adapter and plugged into the PCIE2 slots.

This actually gives a much faster boot time when compared to the RAID 0 disk even though the actual speed of the mSATA can be slower than the RAID 0 when measured with Crystal Disk Mark.

The mSATA in this case was an old one, obviously a modern one would be much faster.

I have used SSDs in a RAID 0 array, but obviously the much greater cost serves me no useful purpose except to demonstrate the vastly increased speed possible.

In fact these days an NVME is vastly better in terms of speed and cost, and in many cases you can now use them as a boot disk.

But a RAID disk can still be better value in terms of cost compared to SSDs and NVMEs
 
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They can have their huge hard drives, i wish they would just leave the GPU`s alone.
 
This is a complete waste, both electric to run it and also the wear and tear on the HDD. Chia can actually kill some consumer level SSD in months, rather than their years of normal life cycle.

Unlike gaming graphic cards, which are a luxury item, HDD is an essential component of a computer.

Bearing in mind that i actually like crypto....but this one i just have to disagree.
 
I'm going to invent a cryptocurrency where mining is based on the number of revolutions of all the fans in your PC case, with hilarious consequences for the supply chain.
 
Someone would hook the fan sense wires up to the CPU clock line and become incredibly rich.
 
Raymond Lin said:
This is a complete waste, both electric to run it and also the wear and tear on the HDD. Chia can actually kill some consumer level SSD in months, rather than their years of normal life cycle.
Click to expand...

Yeah, watch out for loads of "almost new" bargains in the next few months...
 
Retune said:
I'm going to invent a cryptocurrency where mining is based on the number of revolutions of all the fans in your PC case, with hilarious consequences for the supply chain.
Click to expand...

Now imagine one that would be somehow connected to a toilet operation. s***coin anyone?
 
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