Hard-drive Prices Have Gone Crazy

As per the headline above, anyone looking to buy a 14TB Western Digital My Book Essentials drive over the past few days may have noticed the price jump from less than £250 to £499.99!

It's likely this marks the beginning of a bad run of storage shortages and price-hikes following the latest Cryto-Currency craze ('Chia') going mainstream last week.

The price hikes seem to be across the board, albeit affecting larger drives (e.g. 8TB and above) most severely.

Let's hope the storage industry can respond to the increased demand more effectively than has been the case with GPUs.

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Originally Posted by KultiVator

As per the headline above, anyone looking to buy a 14TB Western Digital My Book Essentials drive over the past few days may have noticed the price jump from less than £250 to £499.99!

It's likely this marks the beginning of a bad run of storage shortages and price-hikes following the latest Cryto-Currency craze ('Chia') going mainstream last week.

The price hikes seem to be across the board, albeit affecting larger drives (e.g. 8TB and above) most severely.

Let's hope the storage industry can respond to the increased demand more effectively than has been the case with GPUs.

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It's the perfect storm. Crypto, inflation, chip shortage and massive shipping rates. None of these things are a quick fix. Don't expect the prices to drop anytime soon.

Chia, dude - HDDs are the new GPUs

It sounds like to use those HDDs well you need a ton of RAM and a high end CPU with lots of threads (one per HDD). Just as the likes of the 5800X were becoming readily available, expect it all to go to heck real soon.

Meanwhile you've got the likes of Stellar which is fast, cheap and uses minimal energy fulfilling the promises of these nonsense currencies but those properties means it can't be mined by the greedy and so won't generate the hype of Eth and Chia.

Prices on these bigger drives have been up and down like ... well, I won't use the phrase that sprung to mind as I like my account active and unsuspended, but let's say, frequently, recently.

I've been watching them from 8TB and upwards for about a month, trying to decide on which capacity, and what timing. I finally pulled the trigger on the 12TB MyBook (1-bay) a few days ago. It was about £230, shot up to nearly £270, went in and out of stock like a yoyo, and then back down to £230-ish (I think, without looking it up, it was £232.xx). It's now sitting on the floor in a corner of my home office, still in shrinkwrap, awaiting unboxing. And is currently showing out of stock again, but then, it was a week or so ago too, and came back into stock and dropped £40-ish in price, too.

The moral of that. Prices are .... volatile. And so is stock. But immediate history suggests prices might drop again.

Oh, and as of 5 minutes ago the 14TB was £370 (£369.99 to be exact) which is £5 more than the 16TB.

So unless there's something specific about the 14TB (like knowing it\'s a Red Pro or something and the 16TB isn\'t, the 16TB is a better bet right now.

Prices tomorrow or next week? Who knows, could be 50% or 100% more, or 25% less, or just not available.

All you can do, IMHO, is keep a close eye on it and pull the trigger, or not, when they hit an acceptable price .... if they do. And accept that they may go down right after you buy, or become unavailable while you dither.

I needed one, and fairly soon. I\'d have preferred a bit bigger but 12 TB will do for now, and quite a while, and the cost/TB was acceptable. Waiting months for a better price that might never come was not.

As the old adage goes, it was time for me to poop or get off the potty.

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Originally Posted by Saracen999

....

The moral of that. Prices are .... volatile. And so is stock. But immediate history suggests prices might drop again.

Oh, and as of 5 minutes ago the 14TB was £370 (£369.99 to be exact) which is £5 more than the 16TB.

So unless there's something specific about the 14TB (like knowing it\'s a Red Pro or something and the 16TB isn\'t, the 16TB is a better bet right now.

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And in 5 hours, between my last post and this one, which is between 12:45AM and 5:45AM, that 16TB is now showing

"Currently unavailable.
We don\'t know when or if this item will be back in stock"

Whereas from what I can see SSDs are falling, 1tb for under £70/£80 is something I don\'t recall seeing before.

I expect SSDs with high TBW will be the more sought after models, and we\'ll see those prices rise.

Crazy bit is you have been able to "mine" with hdds for some years, and again in a much more productive way than Chia.

Storj is a way of people basically renting their hdd space and broadband traffic out for cloud storage. That\'s a useful service, for which people are willing to pay money.

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Originally Posted by Rob_B

Whereas from what I can see SSDs are falling, 1tb for under £70/£80 is something I don't recall seeing before.

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From what I can make of it, what's primarily appealing to the Chia crowd is, whether HD or SSD, the more "enterprise" level drives. More like 2TB, even 4TB SSDs and NVMe or, what is it, U.2? Not SATA. And those with a design that allows for much higher levels of 24/7 constant read/write, for ironically (and thankfully) smaller (say, 8TB and down) HDs and most "consumer" SSDs aren't seen as an attractive buy by the Chia crowd because they probably don't have the required longevity.

But if you want big drives, enterprise, or "NAS" or "Surveillance" type .... might bea good idea to get in while you can. Or might not. I'm no expert.

Yeah I ran some test plots on Chia last week, mostly out of curiosity... the SSD's ideally need to be spacious (for parallel plotting at least), fast and crucially have a high TBW rating (unless you're willing to burn the drive out pretty quick). However, once the finished plots hit the magnetic HDDs, the actual amount of subsequent access is minimal during the actual 'farming' and 'harvesting' phases of their lifecycle.

I have a decent rig and managed to churn out 20+ Chia plots in a 24 hour test period (Ryzen 3900x running in parallel with two high-TBW SSDs used for plotting) - but the massive uptake in Chia adoption over the past few days is a bandwagon that I won't be jumping on, as the odds of 'wins' are really pretty slim - unless you have a datacentre-sized operation - and despite all the hype about chia being a 'green' crypto-currency, the computation involved in creating each plot is pretty intense and wasteful).

Couldn't help thinking it was a massive waste of the planet's power and resources - all in the name of false hopes for a quick buck that most will never get the faintest whiff of.

I saw what was going to happen with Chia and nabbed some extra storage even though I was going to hold out for better deals. I tried some plots too,and the thing is unless you have a ton of storage for the plots,TBW isn't as big an issue if you think about it. A single plot needs 1.8TB of writes. Each end plot is 101GB. So you will barely get 70~75 plots on an 8TB hard drive. That is 135TB of writes. The issue is unless you have tons of storage,even a 600TBW disk would required 32TB of storage. One with 1200TBW would require 64TB of storage.

Many SSDs with Phison E12/E16 controllers(most of the PCI-E 4.0 ones),have TBWs of between 1300~1800 TB for the 1TB models,and 2600~3600 TB for the 2TB models. You will need a ton of HDD storage to actually wear out even a consumer SSD!!

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Originally Posted by CAT-THE-FIFTH

I saw what was going to happen with Chia and nabbed some extra storage even though I was going to hold out for better deals. I tried some plots too,and the thing is unless you have a ton of storage for the plots,TBW isn't as big an issue if you think about it. A single plot needs 1.8TB of writes. Each end plot is 101GB. So you will barely get 70~75 plots on an 8TB hard drive. That is 135TB of writes. The issue is unless you have tons of storage,even a 600TBW disk would required 32TB of storage. One with 1200TBW would require 64TB of storage.

Many SSDs with Phison E12/E16 controllers(most of the PCI-E 4.0 ones),have TBWs of between 1300~1800 TB for the 1TB models,and 2600~3600 TB for the 2TB models. You will need a ton of HDD storage to actually wear out even a consumer SSD!!

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Just buy 512GB of ram and do the initial plot on a 400GB ramdisk? ;)

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Originally Posted by DanceswithUnix

Just buy 512GB of ram and do the initial plot on a 400GB ramdisk? ;)

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Each plot needs around 260ish GB of temporary space,so its essentially 3 plots for a 960/1TB SSD AFAIK if you do it in parallel.

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Originally Posted by CAT-THE-FIFTH

Each plot needs around 260ish GB of temporary space,so its essentially 3 plots for a 960/1TB SSD AFAIK if you do it in parallel.

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I guess Optane drives will finally have customers willing to pay Intel's prices!

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Originally Posted by Saracen999

active and unsuspended

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Just like the knickers of the individuals in the phrase you can't use....?

:D

To give some sense of how much the Chia landscape has changed in just a few days...

This time last week, a 14TB drive full of plots was projected to have a probability of 'winning the Chia lottery' every few days (more than once per week).

As of right now, the same quantity of plots aren't expected to yield a 'win' until somewhere between 10 and 40 months!

The exponential growth of the network means most solo farmers are like cheetahs chasing a photon.

Still, it's given a lot of optimistic people an excuse to upgrade their home rigs before reality bites them ;-)

It sounds like in a week you will be able to use a mining pool, which should get home mining a steady income.

Not that home miners will make any real dent on the industrial sized people, as per usual.

I had wondered if this would pay for me setting up a personal cloud in the garage, but the way things are looking I haven't bothered. Specially with the tax implications of going over £1000 in mining income.

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Originally Posted by DanceswithUnix

It sounds like in a week you will be able to use a mining pool, which should get home mining a steady income.

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Yeah - saw that the Chia protocol extensions to allow pooling are due next week. Problem for me is that this feels like a scummy use of hardware, power, etc and encourages more "me too" crypto-currencies to spring up + even more stupid shortages / price increases for PC components.

Might change my mind if my tiny set of test plots generate a win against all the odds ;-)

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Originally Posted by KultiVator

Might change my mind if my tiny set of test plots generate a win against all the odds ;-)

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lol, well there is that.

It is a rubbish use of hardware. I can see me putting something together from old spares in the garage where I have enough old enterprise 1TB drives to make a small ZFS array and see what sort of payout pooled mining gives. I don't see me buying storage for it though.

I don't see anything this does that eg Stellar does for a fraction of the hardware and energy cost other than stir up a pointless mining craze. Not that I have any moral objection to sucking money out of such a scheme, just have to make sure you aren't one of the people that lose in such a craze.

I did notice there are people selling plots at about $16 each. That's kind of amusing, though given the size I think it would be better to just calculate one locally.

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Originally Posted by Ttaskmaster

Just like the knickers of the individuals in the phrase you can't use....?

:D

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Exactamently.

Speaking of Chia, i found this der8auer video interesting. In that it's not so different than other mining efforts using computer hardware.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=twwyBdsRYL4

I watched a bit of that yesterday, seems like a great way to waste storage space :D

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Originally Posted by Corky34

Speaking of Chia, i found this der8auer video interesting. In that it's not so different than other mining efforts using computer hardware.

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That video reinforces my own reservations - having monitored parallel plotting I can vouch for Der Bauer's reservations about SSD thrashing and TBW (Total Bytes Written).

That said - his ThreadRipper rig is nice... but I'd still find better uses for that hardware ;-)

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Originally Posted by KultiVator

That video reinforces my own reservations - having monitored parallel plotting I can vouch for Der Bauer's reservations about SSD thrashing and TBW (Total Bytes Written).

That said - his ThreadRipper rig is nice... but I'd still find better uses for that hardware ;-)

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I haven't watched it, but I would have assumed if you can afford a Threadripper then you can afford enough ram that the whole thing is done in cache. He is using Linux, right?

Sometimes it is better to tile a problem into memory and knock out lots of them serially than do stuff in parallel.

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Originally Posted by DanceswithUnix

I haven't watched it, but I would have assumed if you can afford a Threadripper then you can afford enough ram that the whole thing is done in cache. He is using Linux, right?

Sometimes it is better to tile a problem into memory and knock out lots of them serially than do stuff in parallel.

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You need around 260GB of SSD cache to do one plot,and its more efficient to plot simultaneously. So you would need something like 1TB of RAM.

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Originally Posted by KultiVator

That video reinforces my own reservations - having monitored parallel plotting I can vouch for Der Bauer's reservations about SSD thrashing and TBW (Total Bytes Written).

That said - his ThreadRipper rig is nice... but I'd still find better uses for that hardware ;-)

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To wear out a 2TB Phison E16 NVME SSD(generally have around 3600TBW),you would need nearly 200TB of HDD storage capacity.

Many enterprise SATA,write intensive drives easily have over 8000TBW in 2TB sizes,and many well over 10TBW. So you would need 100s of TB of HDD storage to wear such SSDs out. The main limitation is going to be the HDD storage capacity you have,and the cost of 100s of TB of storage,which is easily much higher than a 2TB Enterprise SSD. Then the space requirements to have dozens of HDDs,especially if you run sort of redundant RAID.

I've probably contributed to the storage problem unintentionally. Heard about Chia and decided I'm not getting stuck on not enough storage for ages because of crypto (I'm itching to change my gfx card but refuse to do so at current prices)
The problem is that I went to order a pair of WD D10 8TB disks as they are DC drives inside and would make a decent capacity mirrored pair. During the ordering process the stock disappeared and it looked like 5TB D10's were available so I just selected those. Turns out they are P10's and those are 2.5" drives with the USB interface soldiered directly to the drive. I've now ordered the D10 8TB for £40 more than they were on Amazon so I can just shuck and plug into my server. The problem is that I now have the P10's and seeing how much income could theoretically be made through Chia I might not return the drives :-S

Maybe CHia income can pay for an overpriced Graphics card so I'm sort of back at square one! :mrgreen:

I've just chucked a spreadsheet together. It looks like Chia storage growth is increasing 10 fold appx every 24 days or 10% per day.
Should the price remain stable and the growth continue, after 1 month, daily profit is 5% of what it is today. I believe that's less profitable than buying a scalped graphics card and mining ether.
Another way of looking at is is take todays daily profit and multiply by 10. Expect no more profit from that storage. It shrinks too quickly.
I think I'll send the 5TB HDD's back!

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Originally Posted by badass

I've probably contributed to the storage problem unintentionally. Heard about Chia and decided I'm not getting stuck on not enough storage for ages because of crypto (I'm itching to change my gfx card but refuse to do so at current prices)
The problem is that I went to order a pair of WD D10 8TB disks as they are DC drives inside and would make a decent capacity mirrored pair. During the ordering process the stock disappeared and it looked like 5TB D10's were available so I just selected those. Turns out they are P10's and those are 2.5" drives with the USB interface soldiered directly to the drive. I've now ordered the D10 8TB for £40 more than they were on Amazon so I can just shuck and plug into my server. The problem is that I now have the P10's and seeing how much income could theoretically be made through Chia I might not return the drives :-S

Maybe CHia income can pay for an overpriced Graphics card so I'm sort of back at square one! :mrgreen:

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I got one of the D10 8TB drives last week and they WD HC320 8TB enterprise drives.

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Originally Posted by CAT-THE-FIFTH

To wear out a 2TB Phison E16 NVME SSD(generally have around 3600TBW),you would need nearly 200TB of HDD storage capacity.

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One subtle detail I’m not sure everyone has picked up on... the amount of data written per plot is greater than the size of the temporary files created on your SSD. There appears to be a recursive aspect to the plot-making process concealed by the headline plot file sizes being quoted. From memory, I believe Der Bauer measured the real figure as being 1.4TB per plot! That really puts a finite lifetime on even a 3600 TBW SSD. Then there’s the high power draw throughout the plotting process and the 24/7 ‘farming’ which you have to keep up to remain synced with the blockchain and an active player ‘in the Chia lottery’.

I don’t fancy the odds with Chia... but might buy shares in Seagate and the power grid instead :-D

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Originally Posted by KultiVator

I don’t fancy the odds with Chia... but might buy shares in Seagate and the power grid instead :-D

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Not a bad idea. The best way to make money in a gold rush is selling picks and shovels. Next best would be buying shares in those that do I guess.

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Originally Posted by badass

I've just chucked a spreadsheet together. It looks like Chia storage growth is increasing 10 fold appx every 24 days or 10% per day.
Should the price remain stable and the growth continue, after 1 month, daily profit is 5% of what it is today. I believe that's less profitable than buying a scalped graphics card and mining ether.
Another way of looking at is is take todays daily profit and multiply by 10. Expect no more profit from that storage. It shrinks too quickly.
I think I'll send the 5TB HDD's back!

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The need to compute plots should make it more linear than that, but it is still an arms race for who can grow their number of plots the fastest. In my book that instantly kills any green credentials it might try and claim. If the network right now is fine, why should there be any incentive to massively expand it with mining capacity?

If you have a good internet connection, then you could use those hard drives to farm Storj. That is basically being paid to store people's backups, and AFAIK can be done with a USB drive and a Raspberry Pi.

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Originally Posted by KultiVator

From memory, I believe Der Bauer measured the real figure as being 1.4TB per plot!

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I got to watch his video, the cloud compute thing was a bit iffy. He was locally using Windows, and from what Son of a Tech was saying on his channel if you switch to Linux you get a 15 to 20% speed boost (which makes sense given the better block caching in Linux). So Der Bauer switched to a ramdisk which being on the cloud forced him to use Linux and at that point he was going 10% faster than on his local machine. So that's actually slower. I assume Linux gets the performance from optimising away some of the ssd writes, but even if 20% of them are optimised out that's still over 1TB per plot.

For the farming stage, it sounds like people are able to do that on the cpu power of a consumer NAS box. You might want to add Qnap or similar shares to your mix :)

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Originally Posted by KultiVator

One subtle detail I’m not sure everyone has picked up on... the amount of data written per plot is greater than the size of the temporary files created on your SSD. There appears to be a recursive aspect to the plot-making process concealed by the headline plot file sizes being quoted. From memory, I believe Der Bauer measured the real figure as being 1.4TB per plot! That really puts a finite lifetime on even a 3600 TBW SSD. Then there’s the high power draw throughout the plotting process and the 24/7 ‘farming’ which you have to keep up to remain synced with the blockchain and an active player ‘in the Chia lottery’.

I don’t fancy the odds with Chia... but might buy shares in Seagate and the power grid instead :-D

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A single plot is going to use upto 1.8TB of writes during its creation. So that is around 2000 plots at around 109GB each. So technically closer to 220TB,but still for the average person its the amount of storage which is the problem here. Even if you are paying £200 for a 12TB HDD,you looking at over £2000 just for the storage as a JBOD.

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Originally Posted by CAT-THE-FIFTH

A single plot is going to use upto 1.8TB of writes during its creation. So that is around 2000 plots at around 109GB each. So technically closer to 220TB,but still for the average person its the amount of storage which is the problem here. Even if you are paying £200 for a 12TB HDD,you looking at over £2000 just for the storage as a JBOD.

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There was also that test done a while back where they wrote a bunch of SSDs to destruction. That showed many going massively past their warranted write life.

I think this was it: https://techreport.com/review/27909/...eyre-all-dead/


You are more likely to be lucky on SSD life than you are on farming a Chia :D

OFC if mining pools mean you have to throw away your plots and start again, then that's pretty sucky for your SSD write life.

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Originally Posted by DanceswithUnix

There was also that test done a while back where they wrote a bunch of SSDs to destruction. That showed many going massively past their warranted write life.

I think this was it: https://techreport.com/review/27909/...eyre-all-dead/


You are more likely to be lucky on SSD life than you are on farming a Chia :D

OFC if mining pools mean you have to throw away your plots and start again, then that's pretty sucky for your SSD write life.

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Well even if I was to fill the 8TB disc I got hold off recently,I would barely write 144TB(assuming file uses 1.8TB of writes) and at £170ish a pop for decent SMR 8TB HDDs,I don't really think I want to spend anymore! One of my SSDs is a secondhand enterprise grade SSD,which has a write endurance of over 6000TB. What I found more surprising is how much faster it seems,than an MX500 in certain scenarios.

BTW,I am not sure if you are aware,the Corsair MP510 has been stealth replaced by the MP510B with significantly less endurance.

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Originally Posted by CAT-THE-FIFTH

BTW,I am not sure if you are aware,the Corsair MP510 has been stealth replaced by the MP510B with significantly less endurance.

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After the one I got with my wife's machine, the software was such a nightmare I think I'm done with Corsair for SSDs.

My last one was a WD 750. Got a good deal on that, direct from WD.

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Originally Posted by DanceswithUnix

After the one I got with my wife's machine, the software was such a nightmare I think I'm done with Corsair for SSDs.

My last one was a WD 750. Got a good deal on that, direct from WD.

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I have the slightly earlier WD SN700. Funnily enough it used to randomly disconnect,when I first got it. However,with newer drivers/updates and BIOS revisions it hasn't done it.

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Originally Posted by CAT-THE-FIFTH

A single plot is going to use upto 1.8TB of writes during its creation.

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Yeah - a 100GB plot that takes ~1.8TB of SSD writes to create - plus another write to conventional HDD at the end of the process and all of the CPU time and power used during the multi-hour computation cycle... that's a pretty crappy misuse of resources for most rational people, given the payback odds (even allowing for uncertainties around pooling / dilution / Chia network expansion rate / etc).

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Originally Posted by CAT-THE-FIFTH

still for the average person its the amount of storage which is the problem here. Even if you are paying £200 for a 12TB HDD,you looking at over £2000 just for the storage as a JBOD.

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Agreed - it's also a moving target - unless you keep plotting and expanding your storage, your odds constantly decline - literally by the second - and you become the Cheetah chasing a photon I spoke of in an earlier post.

I'm not an out and out tree-hugger - but this doesn't bode well for calming the human excesses that have fueled climate change.

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Originally Posted by CAT-THE-FIFTH

One of my SSDs is a secondhand enterprise grade SSD,which has a write endurance of over 6000TB.

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Now that's a proper Chia-mining SSD - depending on how much action it has seen in service.

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Originally Posted by CAT-THE-FIFTH

[..] the Corsair MP510 has been stealth replaced by the MP510B with significantly less endurance.

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That's the sneaky kind of thing TeamGroup have been up to as well - downgrading the spec of both the FLASH type and/or Cache specs without changing the model name / number.

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Originally Posted by DanceswithUnix

Crazy bit is you have been able to "mine" with hdds for some years, and again in a much more productive way than Chia.

Storj is a way of people basically renting their hdd space and broadband traffic out for cloud storage. That's a useful service, for which people are willing to pay money.

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and Storj is a coin too, to trade as Crypto. It's an effective model

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Originally Posted by Zak33

and Storj is a coin too, to trade as Crypto. It's an effective model

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Yeah, seems a pretty neat idea.

For those that haven't seen it: Nodes look pretty easy to set up, users buy Storj, then use it to buy cloud storage services, miners make Storj by providing the storage service and sell the Storj coins back to the users.

There is also Filecoin which seems to have some interesting ideas, but also seems to come with much higher hardware requirements.

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Originally Posted by DanceswithUnix

Yeah, seems a pretty neat idea.

For those that haven't seen it: Nodes look pretty easy to set up, users buy Storj, then use it to buy cloud storage services, miners make Storj by providing the storage service and sell the Storj coins back to the users.

There is also Filecoin which seems to have some interesting ideas, but also seems to come with much higher hardware requirements.

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That does seem like a much more stable, and inherently useful, model than 'standard' cryptocurrencies which, regardless of the original intent, seem to have transmuted into some kind of 'get-rich-quick' Ponzi scheme that messes up hardware markets and it seems, the environment at the same time. At least Storj, which I'd never heard of, works by providing an actually useful service where user demand is the limiting factor.

But either way, personally, I can't be bothered. I'll stick to just buying (when you can get it, grrr!) what storage I need for my own purposes and using it myelf, not either using cloud storage services, or providing space and renting it out.

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Originally Posted by DanceswithUnix

Storj [..] seems a pretty neat idea.

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Agreed - and at least Storj's premise is based on providing a useful service from the resources that are consumed.

Elon has had a rethink on Bitcoin... also raises questions that might begin to alter public perception of crypto-currencies:

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/...re/?comments=1

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Originally Posted by Saracen999

At least Storj, which I'd never heard of, works by providing an actually useful service where user demand is the limiting factor.

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It's certainly an interesting idea, but I'd be paranoid about someone using it to store something illegal, which could obviously get the hoster in deep trouble.

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Originally Posted by Saracen999

But either way, personally, I can't be bothered. I'll stick to just buying (when you can get it, grrr!) what storage I need for my own purposes and using it myelf, not either using cloud storage services, or providing space and renting it out.

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Same here, it's just too much hassle in the end to do it for anyone else's stuff - especially as you'll obviously need that space at some point anyway, hence buying it in the first place.

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Originally Posted by Output

It's certainly an interesting idea, but I'd be paranoid about someone using it to store something illegal, which could obviously get the hoster in deep trouble.

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Thankfully Storj break files into small encrypted segments and no two segments for a single file are hosted on the same machine/node.

The laws in most countries would have you be no more responsible for unknowingly hosting a fragment of a dodgy file than a bank would be for inadvertently holding the fuse for a bomb in a customer's safety deposit box.

Prices have indeed gone nuts. I spec'd out a NAS build a few months back and logged all the prices, and can confirm that for anything >10TB prices have lept substantially. Even between last night and today prices for 8TB NAS drives jumped. I just ordered a set of enterprise drives instead, and was lucky to be able to get those. They should work in a NAS SFAIK, albeit a bit noisier, but have a longer rated lifespan before failure. I should just have spent the money back in January. It's not worth waiting to see prices continue to leap.

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Originally Posted by ik9000

Prices have indeed gone nuts. [..] I should just have spent the money back in January. It's not worth waiting to see prices continue to leap.

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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 :-(

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Originally Posted by KultiVator

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 :-(

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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.

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Originally Posted by DanceswithUnix

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.

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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.

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Originally Posted by ik9000

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.

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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.

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Originally Posted by DanceswithUnix

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.

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

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Originally Posted by ik9000

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

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

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Originally Posted by KultiVator

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

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