Chia mining can allegedly wreck a 512 GB SSD in forty days

[Redaktion]

Mining Chia on consumer-grade, low-capacity SSDs could prove to be fatal for your drive, says a new report. A 512 GB SSD reportedly lasts only forty days before it exceeds its TBW (terabytes written) rating, while a 1 TB SSD lasts for 80 days.

https://www.notebookcheck.net/Chia-mining-can-allegedly-wreck-a-512-GB-SSD-in-forty-days.538566.0.html

[Erick Kenzi Nagamachi]

That's the problem when people don't read the whitepaper or simple don't follow the website instruction. They don't recommend to use sdd for farming chia, they instruct you to use sdd as intermediate for make plots to hdd (help with time to deploy a plot). If you do right thing you are going to achivr the right result, if you do the wrong choise tour are going to failure to get the right results. Nice article, but you could explain better why people should not use sdd to mine chia.

[Adolf H.]

According to the Chia calculator, 1 TB of space can house approximately 101 plots.

i assume this should be 10 TB

[t4n0n]

That's the problem when people don't read the whitepaper or simple don't follow the website instruction. They don't recommend to use sdd for farming chia, they instruct you to use sdd as intermediate for make plots to hdd (help with time to deploy a plot). If you do right thing you are going to achivr the right result, if you do the wrong choise tour are going to failure to get the right results. Nice article, but you could explain better why people should not use sdd to mine chia.

I think the point of the article is the effect of plotting (as opposed to farming) on SSD wear, even though it somewhat confusingly talks about "hard drives" - which presumably is meant to be interpreted as "storage drive" (as the terms are often used interchangeably, even though the former technically refers to a specific type of storage media).

[_MT_]

As I understand it, the problem is that plotting (the initialization process) requires a lot of temporary space. A 100 GiB plot requires about 240 GiB of temporary space to be generated. That's almost 260 GB in storage terms. Bear in mind that how much space gets taken up is not the same as how much data is written (= how much it costs you in write endurance). And that's exactly what's causing the excessive wear.

The solution isn't to use enterprise-grade, expensive SSDs (which do offer much higher endurances than consumer-grade). The best tool for the job is SDRAM. It can take it all year around and it's incredibly fast by comparison (as I understand it, speed of the temporary storage is a bottleneck, at least with SSDs). The second best solution is volatile flash. Volatile means it doesn't retain information when powered off, just like SDRAM. Which has much, much higher endurance. Most of the wear in flash-based SSDs is caused by making a write persistent (meaning information stays there even without power). An example of this is Optane DIMM which can be configured as volatile (it has other tricks up its sleeve). It's cheaper than RAM and faster than SSD. You'd have to perform cost analysis but as far as technology is concerned, flash-based SSD is a bad fit for this purpose. You are playing into the weakness of the technology, not its strength.

As a side note, 1 TB drive will fit 9 ~100 GiB (k=32) plots. Such a plot takes up almost 110 GB. 9 of them take up about 980 GB. Leaving maybe 9 free.

[_MT_]

As a side note, 1 TB drive will fit 9 ~100 GiB (k=32) plots. Such a plot takes up almost 110 GB. 9 of them take up about 980 GB. Leaving maybe 9 free.

It should be 19 GB free, of course. Not 9. 98 % utilization is not bad at all.

[Spunjji]

Great, we're gonna have more people burning through even more kinds of valuable computer hardware in order to partake in the latest pyramid scheme. Super fucking cool. This is definitely not an indictment of late-stage capitalism or anything.

[vertigo]

Hopefully this will result in people NOT buying up SSDs for this, once they realize (hopefully) that it will cost them far more than they will make.

[Saja Lutor]

Can this coin really be considered truly green? It has already become known that solid-state drives wear out extremely quickly. It doesn't look eco friendly. I think that a project that does not consume electricity and computer hardware can be considered really eco-friendly. For example, Krypton from Utopia P2P (utopia-ecosystem .org)  for this coin you only need a PC and an Internet connection.

[dipique]

That's the problem when people don't read the whitepaper or simple don't follow the website instruction. They don't recommend to use sdd for farming chia, they instruct you to use sdd as intermediate for make plots to hdd (help with time to deploy a plot). If you do right thing you are going to achivr the right result, if you do the wrong choise tour are going to failure to get the right results. Nice article, but you could explain better why people should not use sdd to mine chia.

This is flat out incorrect. Plotting is the the part that produces SSD wear and tear, not farming.

And SSDs ARE the right choice for plotting, just not consumer-grade SSDs that only last a few hundred TBW. My Samsung 970 Evo 500GB is good for 300TBW, while an enterprise class Intel D3-S4510 500GB costs 50% more, but has 10x the write endurance at 3000TBW.