Monday, May 31st 2021
Sabrent Rides the Chia Cryptocurrency Wave, Announces "Plotripper" SSDs with up to 54,000 TBW Endurance
Sabrent, which has become one of the go-tos in the world of Chia plotting and farming due to the price/performance/endurance ratio of its Rocket NVMe SSDs, has announced a new series of products specifically developed and marketed towards the Chia plotting crowds. Their new Plotripper SSDs (which drink from a quite obvious reference to AMD's Threadripper) have been designed to endure the harsh writing cycles for Chia plotting. Plotting is the process wherein you calculate the cryptographically-generated plots, and which can incur SSDs on a 1.6 TB write workload per 101 GB plot. The finished plot is then usually offloaded to a slow, capacious storage device (such as an external HDD) where it lays, awaiting for network challenges ad-infinitum. At time of writing, the total storage committed to Chia farming is estimated at 14 Exabytes.
The new Plotripper products are available in a mainstream and a "pro" variant. The mainstream Sabrent Plotripper offers a 10,000 TBW for its 2 TB capacity, which is already one of the highest available in consumer drives (until now). The Pro versions, however, promise 27,000 TBW of endurance for its 1 Tb capacity, and a staggering 54,000 TBW endurance rating for the 2 TB one. No word on pricing as of now, but these are sure to become some of the most sought-after SSDs for anyone planning to enter the Chia "farming" scene - and will definitely be priced accordingly.
Source:
TweakTown
The new Plotripper products are available in a mainstream and a "pro" variant. The mainstream Sabrent Plotripper offers a 10,000 TBW for its 2 TB capacity, which is already one of the highest available in consumer drives (until now). The Pro versions, however, promise 27,000 TBW of endurance for its 1 Tb capacity, and a staggering 54,000 TBW endurance rating for the 2 TB one. No word on pricing as of now, but these are sure to become some of the most sought-after SSDs for anyone planning to enter the Chia "farming" scene - and will definitely be priced accordingly.
62 Comments on Sabrent Rides the Chia Cryptocurrency Wave, Announces "Plotripper" SSDs with up to 54,000 TBW Endurance
The key problem it has to overcome there, is it can't be used online. Because you need to provide proof of voter eligibility. Basically the same issue as the real world. The tech is solid.
I think that alone should be enough to give it a chance, but meh, go with what your own whims dictate.
Tbf I'm non plussed by most coins but the space burn on this is ridiculous ,not too keen on the ssd death rate either , Eth doesn't kill the chips it runs on , it's exactly what isn't needed during a chip drought.
No it hasn't done that overall yet but to deny it's inherently useful properties is to be ignorant and blind.
All blockchain is at it's essence is a chain of signatures with peer to peer validation. That's it. And what does it do? It makes forgery nearly impossible because to corrupt the record you must control the majority of nodes. Thats really really hard.
Almost every problem you take issue with is not inherent to the tech.
The issue is implementation, not idea.
I'm not even really concerned with the energy usage. It's blown out of proportion vs other industries IMO. But the inventory stock consumption it takes from other sectors really is an issue in my eyes.
Chia does not solve that.
Just had a thought, and while I doubt it's original, it seems a good one: Require solar power for mining! If every government mandated that you could mine whatever you want provided that such equipment draws it's power from a solar source, the power problems would go bye-bye... Just a thought.
SLC mode is not like native SLC. Native SLC these days tends to be oriented at ultra low latencies as storage class memory (SCM) with smaller page functions and higher endurance (100K P/E). With SLC mode you have the same cell size, you just write and store in a SLC-like mode. So it's not really comparable even if performance and endurance are vastly increased as compared to the native NAND/flash (TLC/QLC).
In fact flash can operate in other modes like pTLC (Kioxia's 96L QLC). Of course, you lose capacity doing this, so the 4/8TB of QLC becomes 1/2TB of SLC as on the Plotripper Pro.
As per Cactus Technologies (who sell pSLC industrial drives): "At first look this seems equivalent to SLC, but the MLC (2 or more bits) architecture and finer trace widths of MLC NAND have many more issues with unexpected power loss, cell cross talk, read disturb, data corruption and data retention to be considered. It would be like building a tank on a small car chassis - you just can’t get the reliability." So no, it's NOT the same amount of cycles. It's far less, more like 30-40K vs. 100K.
I gave the example of the Enmotus FuzeDrive which is all QLC and in fact using the same QLC as the Plotripper Pro most likely (unless they have moved up to 144L) and I gave the expected P/E (for TBW calculations) from their internal documents for that flash in both modes. You're trading capacity for endurance, this is known (albeit not by all - but that should have been made clear within this thread by now). However a pSLC drive is distinct from a native SLC drive in terms of endurance and performance, especially because you have industrial pSLC drives that use industrial TLC like FortisMax which is superior to regular TLC (or QLC in this case), and even THAT is inferior to native SLC. They are not at all equal.
So my point was to very clearly lay out the endurance differences here.