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.

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.

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.

With the growing prevalence of crypto currencies and the mining of them, having the right hardware has never been more important. In recent months, the Chia crypto currency has seen a surge in popularity. Unlike other crypto currencies, Chia is based on a proof of space time model rather than proof of work model used by other currencies. In terms of hardware, this mean Chia places more importance on storage rather than performance.

Given its leading position and expertise in high-capacity storage products, ADATA SSDs have been the go-to hardware for many Chia miners the world over. In April of 2021, ADATA saw a five-fold month-over-month increase in its SSD and DRAM orders. What's more, in multiple articles written about the recent Chia trend, many media outlets have cited ADATA SSDs as ideal solutions for Chia mining. The popularity of Chia and its resulting demand for high-capacity SSDs looks to continue.

Chia, the new crypto-currency that relies on storage as proof-of-work to obtain, rather than processing power, is already causing widespread failures of storage devices that have a finite write endurance, according a report by Chinese tech publication MyDrivers. We've detailed how Chia farming works in an older article. Farming it (i.e. participating in the network that keeps the crypto-currency running, in exchange for the currency itself), takes a toll on your storage device. NAND flash-based devices, such as SSDs and USB flash drives, can be re-written a finite number of times, described by manufacturers as "write endurance" and expressed as TBW (terabytes written), or DWPD (drive writes per day, a unit in which drive size is accounted for).

MyDrivers notes that Chia farmers in China are noticing that typical 256 GB SSDs barely last through 40 drive-write days, 80 days for 512 GB, and about 160 days for 1 TB. Endurance varies among the various SSD brands, and NAND flash type used. Since disk space, and not drive performance is paramount in farming Chia, and magnetic storage devices such as HDDs offer more re-writing, stocks of high-capacity HDDs, including those typically headed to the NVR and security surveilance markets, are being soaked up by Chia farmers.

In recent years, the cryptocurrency market has been gaining a great deal of attention, leading to a continuous surge in global mining. Chia, started trading in May, is one of the new types of cryptocurrencies. Its mining method is different from previous cryptocurrencies that use GPUs and ASICs to complete calculations and earn profits. The everlastingly durability EXPERT PCIe SSD, developed by TEAMGROUP's creator sub-brand T-CREATE, is the best choice for the environmentally-friendly "storage capacity mining" that Chia promotes.

The Chia Network utilizes a consensus algorithm called "Proof of Space and Time." A Chia farmer's possible yield is directly proportional to their amount of storage space. If you want to earn higher profits today, you need to have more hard drive space. This approach ensures that no one will design special-purpose hardware (ASIC) for mining it. Storage capacity and power consumption are also relatively unrelated. Therefore, Chia Network is a new "green" currency system. If you want to join the mining community utilizing this environmentally-friendly model, T-CREATE EXPERT PCIe SSD can help you get the greatest results. It features spectacular TBW values of up 12,000 TB, making it the perfect tool for supporting the intense write-cycle algorithms required for the mining process.

A new cryptocurrency going by the name of Chia could bring about a boom in demand for HDD and SSD, which have been kept relatively untouched by the latest mining and supply constraints. However, optimistic predictions of falling prices for NAND (optimistic for consumers, that is) could prove to be erroneous. Apparently, the new cryptocurrency, which saw its whitepaper being published in February 9th and has already led to shortages of high-performance SSDs from China's Jiahe Jinwei.

The cryptocurrency was designed to be mined in SSDs and HDDs, looking to cut on electricity cost from proof of Work (PoW) cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin and (still) Ethereum. The intention is for the cryptocurrency to have as broad an appeal as possible, by excluding the need for prohibitive investments in either ASICs (for Bitcoin) or GPUs (for Ethereum and other Dagger/Hashimoto-based calculations). It also leverages that which is most widely available and oftentimes left empty of any workload - storage space. Due to this, it's been reported that Chinese miners are already buying HDDs (4 TB through to 18 TB) and SSDs (mainly NVMe solutions) in bulk. This could prevent technologists from ushering in the current trend of falling storage pricing - if demand becomes as crazy as it has become in the GPU space.