Backblaze Launches Chia Plot Storage Service with Active Farming

[Raevenlord]

Remember Backblaze - the hosting company that releases regular reports on HDD and SSD reliability deployed on their data servers? Well, the company seems to have found an unexplored market niche between pent up demand for HDD storage and the consumer channel's inability to provide enough hardware for would-be Chia farmers and general consumers who just want to back up their family photos. Unlike some cloud storage providers, who have updated their terms of service so as to exclude usage of their infrastructure to either plot/farm Chia, Backblaze now offers a monthly subscription which, for $5 a month, allows users to store up to 1 TB of plots, while also enabling them to be farmed.

Users will still have to plot their "lottery tickets" on their local computer (and/or acquire them through a number of services which have started offering the ability to download ready-made plots), and then upload them to Backblaze's servers for farming. The Chia Calculator places winnings from 1 TB of plots at around $6.43 per month (considering the current Chia price and overall network space - that does amount to quite meager winnings of $1.43 per month, and doesn't take into account Chia network's space growth, which currently stands at ~20 EiB. Users wanting to make use of this service will have a 100 TB limit on uploaded plots.



View at TechPowerUp Main Site

 

[Space Lynx]

humans and short term greed... what could go wrong with finite resources...

 

[TechLurker]

This makes sense for their HDD testing too, so I'm not surprised they're double (triple?) dipping. Hammer those test drives as hard as possible and compare failure rates, while also providing a service that may or may not last long while sticking to their normal services. Would be interesting to see who exactly makes good quality HDDs and actual endurance.

 

[kayjay010101]

$1.43 per month right now, but with the network space growth Chia is seeing that profit will be entirely gone within a couple weeks, at which point you're paying more than you'd ever potentially gain. Also keep in mind Chia's price is trending downwards as well, so it might not be worth it even if the netspace remains stagnant.
This is also all assuming your plots actually win.

This makes sense for their HDD testing too, so I'm not surprised they're double (triple?) dipping. Hammer those test drives as hard as possible and compare failure rates, while also providing a service that may or may not last long while sticking to their normal services. Would be interesting to see who exactly makes good quality HDDs and actual endurance.

Plot storage isn't hard on the drives at all. They're read a little bit every 30 seconds or so.

 

[TheUn4seen]

humans and short term greed... what could go wrong with finite resources...

Well, since humans collectively don't care about the future and prefer to care about the short term, there is no reason to assume that's objectively bad, is there? You people love your democracy, and the majority certainly makes their wishes clear.

Every person is a potential supervillain, it's just a matter of circumstances and gain. On a small scale - yeah, I'll mine every cryptocurrency and waste unlimited amount of resources if it is profitable for me. I'll use plastic straws and containers because it's convenient. On a large scale - for humanity's sake let's hope I will never have the ability to enforce what I have in mind.

 

[Space Lynx]

Well, since humans collectively don't care about the future and prefer to care about the short term, there is no reason to assume that's objectively bad, is there? You people love your democracy, and the majority certainly makes their wishes clear.

Every person is a potential supervillain, it's just a matter of circumstances and gain. On a small scale - yeah, I'll mine every cryptocurrency and waste unlimited amount of resources if it is profitable for me. I'll use plastic straws and containers because it's convenient. On a large scale - for humanity's sake let's hope I will never have the ability to enforce what I have in mind.

cool, sounds good