In both the Vietnamese market and globally, purchasing a new graphics card (GPU) model such as NVIDIA’s RTX 30 series or AMD’s RX 6000 series is considered an impossible task. The boom in the cryptocurrency market has led miners to continuously buy up vast quantities of GPUs, causing gamers to face the situation where they have money but cannot buy the products.
Notably, it’s not just GPUs; a range of other PC components such as HDDs and SSDs are now also about to fall into a severe shortage as they become targets for the cryptocurrency community. According to new information published by HKEPC, miners in China are currently buying up large quantities of HDDs and SSDs to mine Chia – an emerging cryptocurrency in China.
It is known that Chia is one of the cryptocurrencies advertised as environmentally friendly. Unlike Bitcoin and ETH, which require users to use specialized devices like ASIC miners or GPUs for mining, Chia allows users to utilize free space on main storage devices like HDDs or SSDs for mining.
Bram Cohen – the “father” of Chia, as well as the developer of BitTorrent, stated that SSDs and HDDs consume less energy, are cheaper, and are more readily available than GPUs used for mining Ethereum.
Notably, although Chia has yet to be listed for trading, miners in China have already ‘sensed’ the potential of this coin. They are willing to spend big to buy all available storage devices. Many experts believe that the craze for storage drives could increase the cost of upgrading storage space in smartphones and PCs in the future.
The Larger the Hard Drive, the More Money You Can Earn
The mining process of Chia requires storage devices to have a large amount of free space since the software for mining this coin runs a lot of read/write commands. Simply put, the more free space a hard drive has, the more money the miner can earn.
In this case, durability is just as important as speed; therefore, consumer-grade SSDs are not the best option for mining Chia due to their lower durability, and running these operations will significantly reduce the lifespan of the SSD. Instead, the target of these miners is HDDs and SSDs used in data centers.
As a result, a large quantity of hard drives ranging from 4TB to 18TB has been completely purchased by miners. In the Hong Kong area, the large-scale purchase of hard drives has caused the selling price of these devices to soar from 200 HKD (26 USD) to 600 HKD (76 USD).
Jiahe Jinwei, a major SSD manufacturer in China, has announced that all their high-performance NVMe M.2 1TB and 2TB SSDs branded Gloway and Asgard are out of stock. The manufacturer has also implemented measures to prevent miners from buying large quantities of consumer SSDs while increasing supply and developing storage drives specifically for mining Chia.
Of course, if Chia officially launches, we may face a shortage of hard drives and SSDs. Although SSDs may not be effective for mining Chia, less informed buyers are still purchasing them to “FOMO” into this new cryptocurrency. This further increases the risk for secondary users if they accidentally buy SSDs that have been ‘used’ for mining Chia, as repeated read/write operations significantly reduce the lifespan of the SSD.
Source: Wccftech