Chia Farming Can Disrupt SSDs in a Short Time

It is said that with Chia farming, a 512 GB SSD drive can turn into garbage in 40 days.

Chia, the new cryptocurrency, is positioned as an environmentally friendly alternative to Bitcoin, which uses more energy every year than all of Sweden, thanks to the use of storage space instead of computing power. On the other hand, this doesn’t look like that in the real world. Chia farming seems to drastically reduce the life of HDD and SSD drives.

Chia uses “proof of time and space” instead of traditional cryptocurrencies, doing this with storage space and allows money to be earned by allocating unused disk space.

According to the Fast Technology site, continually raising Chia on a 512GB SSD, which typically has a lifespan of 5-10 years, can reduce the lifespan of this hardware to just 40 days. The reason for this is that 256 TB of data is written within 40 days.

It is underlined that drives with more storage space can last longer, but wear and tear will significantly shorten their life. In other words, Chia farm can kill 1 TB SSD in approximately 80 days and 2 TB SSD in 160 days. The brand and model of these drivers are not detailed.

However, in our endurance test for Samsung 860 Pro and Crucial P5 SSDs, we have seen that SSDs can exceed their specified write life.

Even if SSDs wear out, their prices, which are lower than graphics cards, mean Chia farmers can buy new ones. On the other hand, it is clear that this is not good for the environment at all. Alternatively, SSDs with a long-term warranty can be preferred for crypto mining / agriculture.

Chia (XCH) peaked at $ 1,800 per unit when it launched. It dropped to about $ 600 a few days later. After recovering slightly, XCH is currently hovering around $ 1,300. At the beginning of May, it was revealed that Chia has already used 1 exabyte of space.