Chia continues to disrupt the storage industry, even with the crypto's struggling price. It's spawned SSDs with an insane endurance of 54,000 TBW and sent sales skyrocketing.
Despite the crypto s falling price on June 10, 2021, 6:55
TL;DR: Cryptocurrency Chia has caused demand for hard disk drives to skyrocket in Europe. As many feared when it launched, this has resulted in shortages and increasing prices, forcing Seagate and Western Digital to ramp up production of their HDDs.
The Chia blockchain uses a proof of space and time model instead of proof of work (Bitcoin) or proof of stake (Etherium 2.0), meaning people can farm the crypto by allocating their unused disk space. It s already led to a 500% increase in Adata SSD sales and warranty warnings; Chia farming can reportedly ruin a 512GB SSD in 40 days.
Bitcoin has somewhat stabilized at about $40K after a huge drop last week following Elon Musk s comments and China s affirmation in its position against all cryptocurrencies.
It seems these days you can t mention
anything to do with cryptocurrency without someone jumping in and insisting that cryptocurrency is a disaster for the environment. There are differing opinions on all of this, but a few years ago, BitTorrent creator Bram Cohen set out to build a more eco friendly cryptocurrency called Chia. The basic idea was that, rather than using a proof-of-work system which involves using up a ridiculous amount of computing power, it would use a proof-of-space system, looking at how much hard drive space you re allocating. After many years of development, Chiacoin finally launched a few weeks ago. And, to pretty much prove the old axiom that there s no such thing as a free lunch, while it may not be directly wasting CPU cycles, it s impacted the world differently: by destroying the global hard disc supply chain, driving prices for hard disks through the roof leading people to point out that even if it s not wasting electricity like Bitcoin, it may be
Forward-looking: Sabrent is about to launch the Plotripper SSD series to meet the plotting needs of the most demanding Chia farmers. The series will consist of two models capable of withstanding up to 54,000 TBW (Terabytes Written), the standard Plotripper SSD and the Plotripper Pro.
You may have heard of the novel Chia blockchain which is based on a proof of space and time model, where farmers create plots and save them on a storage device. For plotting, it s recommended to use fast storage solutions such as PCIe SSDs, but it s also important to consider its endurance due to the amount of data it moves inside the device.