What Is Chia Cryptocurrency and Why Is It About to Cause an SSD Shortage?

[Stever]

I am sticking with what Dave Plumer has to say about it, link in the other thread.

 

[NJW]

Kingston SSDNow A400 240Gb
Crucial BX500 240 GB

Both ex-stock, sold and despatched by Amazon, all you can eat. The Crucial is actually on promotion at 29,99 €, delivery Saturday, Kingston is 31,99 €, delivery Friday; sooner with Prime.

Those delivery times suggest that neither stocks are in France – usually it's three days for free delivery, though it can be a lottery.

 

[frase]

no problems here in AUS?

 

[SAFCasper]

If you ask me, Chia is just the current "buzz" coin in the category. It's not a new idea. SiaCoin, Storj, Burst, FileCoin etc have been around for years and work on the same principle of "mining" using storage.

Hopefully I'm right because I can't handle a storage shortage on top of GPU shortages, microprocessor shortages and RAM predicted to rise by around 15% later this year. A decent computer is going to cost a fortune at this rate!

 

[Diggs]

I see Samsung SSDs are up in price. Their 250 GB were as cheap as $31 recently on Amazon but now is $44. Regardless. The small SSDs shouldn't suffer too much in availability as Ch-Ch-Chia benefits from large drives yet I expect their price to suffer.

Samsung 250 GB SSDs are now $53 on Amazon and even with Prime are out a week. Crucial and SanDisk are $47. Sigh......

 

[britechguy]

Pricing on Amazon and other large online retailers can often be very much like pricing for airline tickets was pre-pandemic, variable by almost the minute and by demand over the last few minutes to hours.

But I just bought an Adata 1TB SSD for $89 which is unchanged from the prices I paid last year, and for several different brands including PNY, Samsung, and Crucial.

The issue is going to be production capacity, which will bounce back, so price spikes will not last forever. Not great if you really must have something right now, but . . .

 

[sapphirescales]

@kwest Well unfortunately this CPU takes 14.38 hours on average to plot, which frankly sucks. Even with 2x CPUs I'd only be able to plot 31 plots a day. I also have a Ryzen 9 3900X and I ran a test on that. It will plot in approximately 10.72 hours, which averages out to 23.38 plots per day since I can only plot 11 at a time. I'm using the stock cooler on the Ryzen 9 3900X and it hovers around 95C when plotting so it's probably thermal throttling. I'm thinking about buying a liquid cooler to bring those temps down and see if it can plot any faster. I ran Passmark's test on the CPU and under full load it was again at 95C, but the score it got was on par with other 3900X's.

The reason I wanted to use my server is because it has 18x drive bays and is more reliable than using a bunch of external hard drives hooked up to some knockoff Chinese USB hub. I did find this hub though, which looks high quality:

https://www.amazon.com/Sabrent-Aluminum-Switches-Included-HB-PU16/dp/B07KHRLSTT/ref=sr_1_3?dchild=1&keywords=16+port+usb+hub&qid=1620755526&sr=8-3

I've also thought about storing the plots on the server and mapping them as network drives.

Coincidentally a drive my main server just went down and so did the drive in one of my main computers. The drive in the server was a backup for the computer so now I'm left with nothing but a cloud backup. Unfortunately I really need the files for a project I'm working on but they're 333GB in size and will take a long time to restore through Crashplan. The SSD storing the operating system on my server also died (It's a week old) so I had to reload my server from scratch, which took like 12 hours. I'm just not meant to start this Chia thing before it requires 1+petabyte for mining to be viable.

 

[kwest]

@kwest Well unfortunately this CPU takes 14.38 hours on average to plot, which frankly sucks. Even with 2x CPUs I'd only be able to plot 31 plots a day. I also have a Ryzen 9 3900X and I ran a test on that. It will plot in approximately 10.72 hours, which averages out to 23.38 plots per day since I can only plot 11 at a time. I'm using the stock cooler on the Ryzen 9 3900X and it hovers around 95C when plotting so it's probably thermal throttling. I'm thinking about buying a liquid cooler to bring those temps down and see if it can plot any faster. I ran Passmark's test on the CPU and under full load it was again at 95C, but the score it got was on par with other 3900X's.

The reason I wanted to use my server is because it has 18x drive bays and is more reliable than using a bunch of external hard drives hooked up to some knockoff Chinese USB hub. I did find this hub though, which looks high quality:

https://www.amazon.com/Sabrent-Aluminum-Switches-Included-HB-PU16/dp/B07KHRLSTT/ref=sr_1_3?dchild=1&keywords=16+port+usb+hub&qid=1620755526&sr=8-3

I've also thought about storing the plots on the server and mapping them as network drives.

Coincidentally a drive my main server just went down and so did the drive in one of my main computers. The drive in the server was a backup for the computer so now I'm left with nothing but a cloud backup. Unfortunately I really need the files for a project I'm working on but they're 333GB in size and will take a long time to restore through Crashplan. The SSD storing the operating system on my server also died (It's a week old) so I had to reload my server from scratch, which took like 12 hours. I'm just not meant to start this Chia thing before it requires 1+petabyte for mining to be viable.

I switched to swars plotting manager. Total game changer. It runs on auto. Try it out

 

[sapphirescales]

Sorry to bump a necro thread but I don't want to make a whole new topic for this and this is the only Chia thread on the forum, so yeah...

I have about 300TB plotted and am making approximately $20/day. I also mine Ethereum and make about $14/day from that. It's not much, but crypto brings me in about an extra $1,000/month. Pretty good for just leaving some hardware running in the background. And if crypto continues to go up in value, the crypto I mine now might be worth millions in a decade or two. I'm not selling any of it.

I'm on hpool's unofficial pool and I'm also on SpacePool's official pool. I'm mining Chia forks such as Flax using my standard plots. Those standard plots are also compatible with hpool's unofficial pool so I'm able to mine Chia and its forks using about 150TB of plots while I have another 150TB plotted using portable plots that are compatible with official pools.

I'm mining about .5 Flax per day. If Flax is ever worth as much as Chia is now, that's $130/day! Unofficially Flax is worth between $10-$20 per coin but it's not officially traded yet so it's all speculation at this point. Before Chia was officially traded people were buying it for about $10 so when Flax starts trading it could very well go for much higher than that.

 

[Diggs]

I've been trying to understand how some are reporting profits yet Backblaze that has the drives already on hand, spun up and idle have analyzed Chia every which way and they cannot see any way to make a profit. Hmm.....

 

[sapphirescales]

I've been trying to understand how some are reporting profits yet Backblaze that has the drives already on hand, spun up and idle have analyzed Chia every which way and they cannot see any way to make a profit. Hmm.....

Enterprise grade HDDs are much more expensive than the cheapo WD external hard drives I'm using. There's also the matter of plotting the plots, which requires expensive SSDs and a lot of RAM. Also, Backblaze made that statement back when netspace was doubling like every 3 days. Netspace has remained quite stable for the past month or so, so it seems that there's going to be a predictable ROI going forward. Oh, and Backblaze actually has alternative uses for hard drives, so Chia has to be more profitable to them than just putting that money into marketing and getting more backup customers. Most of their customers use less than 100GB of storage, so a single $500 16TB Enerprise drive can easily net them $840/month (14TB/100GB = 140 customers x $6/month). I'm using 14TB as the full 16TB isn't usable after formatting the drive.

Compare that to Chia, which would only net $32/month for 140 plots. Yeah, Backblaze has to pay for marketing to get those other customers, but at $840 vs $32, it's a no-brainer. Then you have to add the cost of the plotting hardware, wearing out SSDs, etc. For a company like Blackblaze, Chia mining is a TERRIBLE value proposition. Chia would have to reach $7,000 in order to gain them the same revenue and right now it's only at $270.