The mining of the new Chia cryptocurrency is one of the big attractions right now, especially in Asian countries. This crypto has the particularity of not being exploited by using the power of the GPU but rather by using the storage device, where obviously the faster the best performance is obtained. This once caused a shortage of SSDs and hard drives in Asia, but now other symptoms of their use are starting to emerge: SSD durability runs out in just a few days.
The first SSD killed while extracting Chia after only 40 days
In addition to requiring high-capacity storage devices, Chia mining requires high-throughput storage devices for the “ mining ” (or growing, as they say) performance to be productive. The problem is that Chia mining also requires a huge amount of data writing which quickly consumes the TBWs of SSDs as we already noticed a few days ago.
As we had anticipated at the beginning, the first consequences of the farming of Chia are already starting to be felt: only after 40 days of extraction, the first SSD with a capacity of 512 GB has already activated its read-only protection mode, that is, it has bypassed the protection mechanism so as not to lose data when it has reached its write limit. They did not specify what the SSD was or how many TBW it had from the factory, but of course this happens after only 40 days of mining is a very worrying situation.
Typically, a 512GB SSD intended for the consumer market has enough durability to live 8-10 years without any issues when used normally. However, the heavy use to which they are subjected during the extraction of Chia results in the performance of writing and erasing operations at a constant rate for 24 hours, consuming this durability too quickly and causing the early death
Chia’s profitability questioned
Many manufacturers are now releasing SSDs specifically designed for Chia mining, with overwhelming amounts of TBW like the TeamGroup they announced yesterday, with 12TB and 12,000 TBW of durability but at a really steep price. The fact that Chia mining consumes the durability of SSDs so quickly puts the profitability of this cryptocurrency into question, because although the initial investment is usually less than mining Ethereum or other cryptos mined with the GPU, yes the hardware fails so quickly it will. force miners to replace devices from time to time.
At the same time, this will lead to a further shortage of components as miners will have to buy a lot more devices than initially thought, and if the stock is already starting to be a problem in the Asian market, it will surely lead to a slump. things. even worse.
The point is, the price of Chia is going up almost madly as we stated at the start, but the fact that the material dies so quickly can cause a great loss of interest and its price to drop. Time will tell, but the data is there, and if the first SSD is dead after just 40 days of extraction, it won’t take long to start seeing a lot more of similar situations.