Seagate & Western Digital Increase HDD Production to Meet Chia Demand

[Uskompuf]

The demand for HDDs has increased significantly due to Chia cryptocurrency mining in recent times causing major shortages and increasing retail prices. Seagate and Western Digital are increasing the production of their high-capacity HDD models by increasing the utilization rate on existing production lines in an attempt to satisfy this demand. The companies have limited options to increase production in the short-term due to bulk contracts for 60% - 70% of total production and neither company plans to construct new factories in the immediate future. The total global storage capacity allocated to Chia mining has recently surpassed 20 Exabytes up from 1 Exabyte in April and doesn't show any signs of stopping. The shortages look set to continue with both companies happy to monitor the situation and take advantage of the increased demand before deciding on future expansion plans in the coming years.



View at TechPowerUp Main Site

 

[Dammeron]

I frickin' hate it. Another crypto just to raise the prices of hardware and consume (or rather waste) an astounding amount of energy to mine it...

I'm not againts cryptocurrencies per se, but the way they are produced is just plain wrong.

 

[Shihab]

On the bright side: At least storage OEMs aren't shying from openly embracing the new demand, instead of dabbling in creative accounting to hide new profits as gaming ones. -_-

 

[Prima.Vera]

Chia or XCH is going down week by week. Is it still viable??

I frickin' hate it. Another crypto just to raise the prices of hardware and consume (or rather waste) an astounding amount of energy to mine it...

I'm not againts cryptocurrencies per se, but the way they are produced is just plain wrong.

Is just a bubble, as soon as its over, they will be forced to reduce the price due to oversupply.

 

[Dammeron]

Is just a bubble, as soon as its over, they will be forced to reduce the price due to oversupply.

More like the market will be flooded with used GPUs cause miners will dump their (now useless) cards, causing the prices to drop significantly.

I'm more annoyed by things that are irreversibly lost - mainly the energy wasted.

 

[micropage7]

and after vga card getting rare and rare, now hdd

 

[zlobby]

Chia or XCH is going down week by week. Is it still viable??


Is just a bubble, as soon as its over, they will be forced to reduce the price due to oversupply.

They have issues with the smart contracts and hence, pools. Guys are behind schedule.

More like the market will be flooded with used GPUs cause miners will dump their (now useless) cards, causing the prices to drop significantly.

I'm more annoyed by things that are irreversibly lost - mainly the energy wasted.

Energy is never wasted. It only transformed and transferred.

 

[deKev]

Totally agreed. There's nothing wrong with cryptocurrencies per se, at least for those that offer genuine fintech innovation. Rather, it is the money-grabbing desire of ordinary people and corporations alike that is causing all the problems: hardware shortage, rising hardware cost, environment impact, facilitating illicit trade ...

And CHIA, despite its commendable raison d'etre which is green money for the digital world, is unfortunately following the footsteps of all the not-so-eco-friendly coins that it is designed to replace. But I get it, CHIA has simplified the mining process and lowered the barrier to entry even further than its forbears, so now it's just a simple matter of downloading an app to your computer that has some spare storage space, click a few buttons, and voila, free money! So simple even your granny could do it!

IMHO, cryptocurrencies won't go away any time soon, and many, many more will join the fray. So it's almost inevitable that the relatively cheap and affordable hardware that you have been enjoying, well, enjoy them for a bit longer, because another coin will surely come along, with another hardware component its target ...

 

[dicobalt]

SupplyChainDestroyer.exe
TotallyLegitCurrency.dll
LaundryService.xml
GetRichQuick.doc

 

[The red spirit]

Should we even care about spinning rust in 2021? It's an obsolete technology for gaming at least as they are way too slow to be practical. At least spinning rust has some uses before it becomes tech dinosaur.

 

[deKev]

Should we even care about spinning rust in 2021? It's an obsolete technology for gaming at least as they are way too slow to be practical. At least spinning rust has some uses before it becomes tech dinosaur.

We shouldn't care because data centers store their data in... air? Yes, that's the the same sort of data centers that enable online gaming and even enable you to view this page.

 

[The red spirit]

We shouldn't care because data centers store their data in... air? Yes, that's the the same sort of data centers that enable online gaming and even enable you to view this page.

You can store this website at your own house if you want. It's not that big and should fit on several hard drives. RAID 10 them and boom TPU server. And considering how woefully inadequate hard drives are, aren't they getting a bit too slow for data center usage? Also wouldn't be those access times way too low anyway?

 

[deKev]

You can store this website at your own house if you want. It's not that big and should fit on several hard drives. RAID 10 them and boom TPU server. And considering how woefully inadequate hard drives are, aren't they getting a bit too slow for data center usage? Also wouldn't be those access times way too low anyway?

Data centers make use of a combination of SSDs and HDDs: SSD for the more time-critical stuff, and spinning rust as you called them, for storing the bulk of their data. But I get it, hard drives are by far the poorer performer in almost every metric, apart from sheer capacity and arguably longevity (think TBW). But unless SSDs can match HDDs in these two metrics, while not costing more per TB in capacity too, then spinning rust will be with us for a long, long time yet.

Think of it like this: everyone these days has phones, tablets, laptops, PCs and smart TVs, so why do we still need paper, which is centuries-old tech?

 

[The red spirit]

Data centers make use of a combination of SSDs and HDDs: SSD for the more time-critical stuff, and spinning rust as you called them, for storing the bulk of their data. But I get it, hard drives are by far the poorer performer in almost every metric, apart from sheer capacity and arguably longevity (think TBW). But unless SSDs can match HDDs in these two metrics, while not costing more per TB in capacity too, then spinning rust will be with us for a long, long time yet.

If you tried to play CS:GO and load it from hard drive, it can take as long at 4 minutes after match has started. It's getting useless, even if you could accept lower performance. It's not much more left, when they are so slow that they won't be enough for anything. It will be the end for HDDs, when their speed will be too low to play video files properly and considering 4K video files and their high bitrate, that will come really soon. SSDs are still too expensive to truly replace spinning rust, but I wouldn't imagine buying a new computer with hard drive either. With games getting so big, it will take a lot of time to load games. CS:GO isn't a big game and it still takes way too long to load.

Think of it like this: everyone these days has phones, tablets, laptops, PCs and smart TVs, so why do we still need paper, which is centuries-old tech?

Tradition and laggards, but this analogy is very poor, because you talk about switch from analog non computer format to binary and digital format. Floppy disks, CDs, zip disks, they all became obsolete and are gone from mainstream usage. Besides cheap and big storage, it's the end for spinning rust. At least you can keep using them until they die from mining, so it's not useless e-waste.

 

[deKev]

If you tried to play CS:GO and load it from hard drive, it can take as long at 4 minutes after match has started. It's getting useless, even if you could accept lower performance. It's not much more left, when they are so slow that they won't be enough for anything. It will be the end for HDDs, when their speed will be too low to play video files properly and considering 4K video files and their high bitrate, that will come really soon. SSDs are still too expensive to truly replace spinning rust, but I wouldn't imagine buying a new computer with hard drive either. With games getting so big, it will take a lot of time to load games. CS:GO isn't a big game and it still takes way too long to load.


Tradition and laggards, but this analogy is very poor, because you talk about switch from analog non computer format to binary and digital format. Floppy disks, CDs, zip disks, they all became obsolete and are gone from mainstream usage. Besides cheap and big storage, it's the end for spinning rust. At least you can keep using them until they die from mining, so it's not useless e-waste.

Oh definitely, if gaming and loading times are all one cares about. I'm sure there's a world of usage possibilities for hard drives other than gaming, I dunno, maybe I'm just too old to keep up. Speaking of old, I believe magnetic tape drives are still being used today (because of their security and durability), wonder what the loading times for your favorite games will be on them, haha.

 

[The red spirit]

Oh definitely, if gaming and loading times are all one cares about. I'm sure there's a world of usage possibilities for hard drives other than gaming, I dunno, maybe I'm just too old to keep up. Speaking of old, I believe magnetic tape drives are still being used today (because of their security and durability), wonder what the loading times for your favorite games will be on them, haha.

Well I haven't touched my hard drive only computer until a week ago. It was super slow and it has Athlon 760K, GTX 650 Ti and Toshiba P300 1TB drive. One year ago I thought it was fine, but after using SSD only system exclusively, it became clear to me that it's the end for hard drives. And you still defend the spinning rust, despite me stating that it's so bad that you miss half of match. And if you mention tape drives, they are very dead to consumer. LTO drives are only good for enterprise backups and they are only good if you can manage to store data in big chunks, otherwise their seek times are awful.

 

[deKev]

Well I haven't touched my hard drive only computer until a week ago. It was super slow and it has Athlon 760K, GTX 650 Ti and Toshiba P300 1TB drive. One year ago I thought it was fine, but after using SSD only system exclusively, it became clear to me that it's the end for hard drives. And you still defend the spinning rust, despite me stating that it's so bad that you miss half of match. And if you mention tape drives, they are very dead to consumer. LTO drives are only good for enterprise backups and they are only good if you can manage to store data in big chunks, otherwise their seek times are awful.

Hey, that's just the point I've been trying to make, you just made it better, LOL. Every drive has their use, gamers on SSDs for their speed, data centers on their HDDs for their cheap capacity, and enterprises backing up on their tape drives for their security. Just because you don't use hard drives does not make them obsolete outright, does it? And after all that, you better be on NVMe Gen4 SSD, my friend, haha.

 

[The red spirit]

Hey, that's just the point I've been trying to make, you just made it better, LOL. Every drive has their use, gamers on SSDs for their speed, data centers on their HDDs for their cheap capacity, and enterprises backing up on their tape drives for their security. Just because you don't use hard drives does not make them obsolete outright, does it? And after all that, you better be on NVMe Gen4 SSD, my friend, haha.

For some reason they are still sold to consumers, so no companies don't think that they aren't good enough for something yet and for computers they unfortunately are becoming. And my argument about tapes, didn't make your point better, as no consumer can easily buy either tapes or readers and consumers don't use them as they would be infuriatingly impractical. Also LTO tapes were never intended to be used at home, meanwhile consumer hard drives are.

The biggest advantage of SSD isn't just sequential reads or writes, but very low access times and IOPS, that was the biggest factor why SSDs got so successful and that's why NVMe 4 won't be a truly meaningful technology. Not to mention that Windows itself is a big SSD bottleneck.

 

[deKev]

Got it, older techs are all beneath you, while techs newer than yours are 'not meaningful'.

 

[80-watt Hamster]

Energy is never wasted. It only transformed and transferred.

But it can be transformed into a state that's less useful for poor reasons. The chemical energy transformed in an oil well fire still exists as thermal energy, but it would have been much more useful if it been used to heat a home or run an engine, rather than released directly without any tangible benefit.

 

[zlobby]

But it can be transformed into a state that's less useful for poor reasons. The chemical energy transformed in an oil well fire still exists as thermal energy, but it would have been much more useful if it been used to heat a home or run an engine, rather than released directly without any tangible benefit.

Usefulness is human concept. To the universe we live in it's all the same.

 

[R-T-B]

I frickin' hate it. Another crypto just to raise the prices of hardware and consume (or rather waste) an astounding amount of energy to mine it...

Chia doesn't use a lot of energy at all...

I'm more annoyed by things that are irreversibly lost - mainly the energy wasted.

Then Chia is not the coin to be mad at.

 

[80-watt Hamster]

Usefulness is human concept. To the universe we live in it's all the same.

Feeling existential today?

 

[The red spirit]

Got it, older techs are all beneath you, while techs newer than yours are 'not meaningful'.

Dude, I own quite a bit of hard drives, even 10k rpm Raptor.

 

[deKev]

Dude, I own quite a bit of hard drives, even 10k rpm Raptor.

Surely, you meant 'spinning rust'?