Hard-drive Prices Have Gone Crazy

[DanceswithUnix]

Sounds like your new NAS is going to be the mut's nuts!

Most of us probably didn't have a handle on the impact Chia was going to have until those first reports of shortages and prices rocketing in Asia about a month ago.

At least we now have parity in the price and availability of most components you might want to for a new PC build or rig upgrade :-(

I'm fingers crossed that plotting will keep the rate that new hard drives can be deployed down to sane levels. There are a lot of hard drives made per year, and this looks a significant but not overwhelming bump in demand. That contrasts with GPUs which can be deployed as fast as you can plug them into a motherboard and boot them off your PXE network booting mining distro.

Remember when you couldn't buy loo roll? There were warehouses full of the stuff, and plenty of raw material for making more, but the shops were empty. Or flour, where there was tons of the stuff around, just not in the 1kg bags that consumers expect.

So I'm believing like a Disney princess that this is a supply chain spike issue, not a real problem.

[ik9000]

I'm fingers crossed that plotting will keep the rate that new hard drives can be deployed down to sane levels. There are a lot of hard drives made per year, and this looks a significant but not overwhelming bump in demand. That contrasts with GPUs which can be deployed as fast as you can plug them into a motherboard and boot them off your PXE network booting mining distro.

Remember when you couldn't buy loo roll? There were warehouses full of the stuff, and plenty of raw material for making more, but the shops were empty. Or flour, where there was tons of the stuff around, just not in the 1kg bags that consumers expect.

So I'm believing like a Disney princess that this is a supply chain spike issue, not a real problem.

If I were a HDD manufacturer with a desire to ramp prices I would not increase supply, let the new normal price bed in and customers adjust to paying 50-100% more than they ought to be, and only then start releasing them in trickles. Basically what the GPU manufacturers have done already.

[DanceswithUnix]

If I were a HDD manufacturer with a desire to ramp prices I would not increase supply, let the new normal price bed in and customers adjust to paying 50-100% more than they ought to be, and only then start releasing them in trickles. Basically what the GPU manufacturers have done already.

There is one difference here that for Chia farming where you are storing huge files for read access, it would seem that the much maligned SMR drives are actually about ideal as performance should be fine but they should be cheaper. So we might see some really huge SMR drives turning up for farming use.

[ik9000]

There is one difference here that for Chia farming where you are storing huge files for read access, it would seem that the much maligned SMR drives are actually about ideal as performance should be fine but they should be cheaper. So we might see some really huge SMR drives turning up for farming use.

SMR for farming use? Already been done: https://youtu.be/EcsLMdn1ujc?t=19

[KultiVator]

SMR for farming use? Already been done: https://youtu.be/EcsLMdn1ujc?t=19

Love it... that thing looks like it'd make short work of ANY plot you throw at it ;-)

[ik9000]

Love it... that thing looks like it'd make short work of ANY plot you throw at it ;-)

You've got to hope there are no shallow electric cables or similar nearby!