Hard Drive and SSD Shortages – Chia the New Cryptocurrency
Cryptocurrency Chia starts trading on Monday, May 3 and there is already a shortage of hard drives and SSDs.
Miners in China are frantically snatching up every hard drive and SSD they can find since Chia mining uses more hard drive space then Bitcoin. Unlike other cryptocurrencies, you don’t mine Chia with a processor, graphics card or ASIC. Instead, you farm Chia with storage space since Chia utilizes a proof of space and time model.
The inventor of BitTorrent, Bram Cohen created Chia to leverage the free space on storage devices. Chai mining uses less power while using standard hard drives and SSDs.
According to a HKEPC’s report, miners are purchasing hard drives sized from 4TB to 18TB in capacity. The panic buying is leading to a hard drive shortage and push prices up. In Hong Kong, hard drives and SSDs prices are expected to increase between $200 HKD to $600 HKD (~$26 to $77).
Due to the constant read and write operations, consumer SSDs aren’t the first choice for farming Chia.
Jiahe Jinwei, one of the large manufacturers in China, told media outlet MyDrives that the company’s Gloway and Asgard high-performance 1TB and 2TB NVMe M.2 SSDs are now sold out.
Will Chia become a serious contender to Bitcoin? Only time will tell so I better buy a spare drive now while I can.
