A new cryptocurrency by the name of Chia Coin has started to gain popularity and Chia Coin is expected to cause a shortage of another PC component this time, this time it being storage devices such as hard drives and SSDs. And in response to this, Chinese manufacturers have commenced production of mining dedicated SSDs which should be hitting retail soon.
The Chia Coin cryptocurrency was founded by the creator of BitTorrent, Bram Cohen. Unlike the traditional cryptocurrency algorithms which rely heavily on GPUs, Chia Coin relies on fast SSDs & HDDs. In short, its mining is mostly done on fast and high-capacity storage devices.
Chinese retail segment is reporting that they are already facing huge shortages of high-capacity HDD and SSDs. 8 TB HDDs are already out of stock and it looks like even stock for lower capacity mainstream drives.
In order to mine Chia coin, a large amount of free space is required to perform several reading and writing operations. In this case, endurance (TBW) is equally as important as speed, so consumer SSDs are not the best choice for mining Chia coin due to their lower endurance, and running these operations will significantly reduce the lifespan of an SSD. Hence, the target for these miners is primarily hard drives and data center SSDs.
Chinese storage manufacturer Jiahe Jinwei has announced that it is starting mass production of SSDs specifically for crypto mining. The dedicated mining SSDs will primarily be targeted towards Chia Coin miners. It is unknown at the moment what kind of specifications these SSDs will boast but from the looks of it, they might be sold directly to miners instead of hitting the retail segment at all.
As of right now, there are a total of 30,000 HDDs with a combined storage space of 260 Petabytes or (260,000 Terabytes) in the mining network and that’s increasing by an average of 500 HDDs per day. We will have to wait and see when these mining SSDs launch and how they effect Chia coin mining.
