We have already seen that some of the consequences of this new fever for the cultivation of Chia include the shortage of certain high capacity mechanical hard drives and their consequent increase in prices, but we have also been able to verify the disastrous results that this activity brings. when it comes to SSD lifespan, which is severely reduced to the point that a 512GB SSD barely supports 40 days of heavy mining.
The Chia Mining SSD guarantee
A few weeks ago, it emerged that some manufacturers (Galax was the first) had decided to include a clause in the warranty contract for their semiconductor devices, which gave the manufacturer the power to voiding the warranty on an SSD
SSD makers are currently under pressure in two directions: from the miners in Chia and from the industry’s component shortage. Miners are adding more demand to the market, while a shortage of NAND makes it difficult for manufacturers to keep pace.
Today, many SSD manufacturers have started lowering the endurance ratings of their consumer SSDs to combat both of these factors. Today’s tight supply market makes it difficult for manufacturers to replace their products, and miners in Chia are trying to put additional pressure on manufacturers’ support services, demanding replacements for SSDs that have reach the end of their useful life.
All this provokes two reactions from the manufacturers: on the one hand they start to modify the resistance rates of their units (TBW) to indicate that their resistance is lower than what they said previously (¿they were lying to us before exaggerating the numbers?), and on the other hand they follow the steps of Galax to indicate in their warranty contract that if they detect that they have been used to extract Chia, they reserve the right to void the warranty.
A decision that harms the consumer
Obviously, this decision is not to the taste of all users. The reaction is understandable, and while we are not going to assess its ethics, it is something that could also penalize normal consumers since, after all, the degradation of the SSD occurs with its use in an irreparable way and even if you do not use for cryptocurrency mining, there are also plenty of other ways to make degradation far greater than what manufacturers might consider “normal use”.
Typically, the durability consumption of a consumer SSD in a gaming PC averages 30 GB written per day, which with the TBW rates of modern SSDs can mean that the durability of the device is not. would be depleted only to last longer. more than a decade, a more than reasonable amount of time because usually no one “holds” a PC for more than 10 years and you will end up changing the SSD device anyway.
However, if TBW tariffs are reduced, this period can be drastically reduced and users who make heavy use of their storage media (eg, professional publishers) could be severely penalized by this situation.