Remember when we used to build our own PCs? It was a beautiful time for DIYers, back in the “before times.” Before COVID-19. Before the perfect storm of profitable cryptocurrency mining, silicon shortages and scalpers catapulted graphics card prices to stratospheric new heights – if you can even find one to begin with.
Don’t look now, but that perfect storm might be on a reunion tour, and this time it’s coming for your hard drives.
Chia is a new blockchain and crypto transaction platform that promises to be
wayyyy more efficient than power-hungry, stuff like Bitcoin and Ethereum. Why? Because it uses free hard drive space.
Also? It might become ridiculously popular thanks to the person behind it: Bram Cohen, the inventor of BitTorrent.
Using the Chia Blockchain software (which is open-source and
available on GitHub), users create “plots” of roughly 108GB on their storage drives. Then transactions are solved (farmed?) with a “
Proof of space and time” algorithm designed to be significantly more environmentally friendly.
Considering you can have enterprise-class hard drives or, basically, any storage drive attached to something energy-efficient like a Raspberry Pi, it certainly seems like less of an electricity hog.
But while you can have a low-powered system farming away once your plots are created, first you have to create those plots.
High-performance NVMe SSDs are recommended for the fairly intensive task of creating the plots. Then, ideally, you move those plots to roomy external drives (the software allows you to do this automatically by designating temporary locations for the plotting process, and permanent locations for your finished plots).
Chia farmers earn block rewards and transaction fees by committing spare space to the network to help secure transactions.
Lots and lots of spare space.
So let’s add all this up: a nice-looking GUI interface for Windows, macOS and Linux. The pedigree of Bram Cohen behind it. And both SSDs and roomier, slower hard drives needed for the perfect farm.
Folks, if you need storage drives, buy then now. Buy then right now.
I’m hearing that China is already selling out of various models, and manufacturers are already producing (not talking about, but actually producing) drives designed with Chia farming in mind. Probably with ultra-high endurance targets in mind…