Is it possible to use a RAMDisk to mine Chia? I assume it would solve the issue of writing a disk to death. Maybe it is not cost effective?
Yes, but the very least you can do is 512GB and run 1 plot which makes no sense. You'd need 1024GB+ to even do any good, and with DDR4, that's north of 10 grand USD. Your ROI would be quite far out. According to chiacalculator.com, assuming a 15% weekly network growth, 30 days of exponential growth and then 150 days of stabilizing growth, with a plotting speed of 1 TiB per day (~10 plots in a day, would require at least 1024GB and a script that staggers plots properly so you maximize the amount of plots running at the same time) you could estimate to have earned $10K by the 15th of November, assuming Chia stays at $1125. That's over 6 months ROI for just the storage/memory, add on the cost of a server capable of running 1TB of DDR4, you're looking more at ROI well into 2022. Oh, and your plots would also need about 200 TiB of HDD storage to sit on, so that's another $5000 assuming $25/TB in just drives + a JBOD solution adding another $500-1500 on top of that...
With DDR3 you could make a case, but you'd need a very beefy server from that era (DL580 G7, for example) to even fit that much memory since DDR3 was limited to 32GB per DIMM, so you'd need 32+ DIMM slots.
The power cost, noise, initial cost (a DL580 g7 used is like $1000+ and the memory is ~$2500) and cooling required makes this an infeasible option unless you get most of the stuff for free since it's so old.
I have seen some people test AWS for this (renting a server in the cloud) but they found it was barely profitable or not profitable depending on the value of Chia. It never seemed like a good idea at least.
It's also fear mongering over nothing. Chia is already tanking hard. It will NOT affect storage prices beyond this initial (frankly dumb) brief rush.
Where do you reckon that? According to coinbase it's almost back to where it launched since it tanked. It was in the $1200 range on the 30th, tanked to $600 over the course of the following week, but now it's back at $1125.
edit: weird phrasing