Exbibyte frenzy: How mining for crypto Chia turned me into a storage addict

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OWC

Over the past few years, I have had a group of friends who have tried to convince me to start mining Ethereum. I have access to a few gaming computers and the necessary GPUs to operate to generate passive income. I resisted as long as I could, only because it seemed like a somewhat intimidating project to tackle. I finally gave in and have been mining Ethereum intermittently over the last six months or so, learning as I go – both about the various mining pools and upcoming changes to Ethereum, but also about the crypto as a whole.

I am not yet rich. The money I made hasn’t been huge, but it’s a fun hobby at least.

Towards the end of March, I heard about Chia, a fairly new crypto that claims to be ‘green’ because instead of relying on power-hungry GPUs for mining, Chia uses Proof of Space and Time. I don’t fully understand the approach (this goes for any crypto), but I do know that this protocol relies on storage space and compares challenges emitted by the blockchain to hashes stored in the plots of your space. storage available.

The idea behind the business is that anyone can farm for Chia with the available disk space they already have, with little or no investment required. After hesitating to enter crypto for years, I decided that Chia had a chance like any other to enter at ground level and see how many coins I could farm. So I started buying WD EasyStore drives from Best Buy, which were affordable at the time.

I learned as much as I could about creating plots – or creating 108GB files that store hashes used for challenges – as quickly as possible. I ended up winning a few blocks which resulted in a small amount of Chia Coins in my account. The more I earned, the more I wanted to increase the size of my “farm” by adding more storage and filling them with even more plots.

But here’s the problem: tens of thousands of other crypto miners have had the same thought. And so, the prices of storage started to increase as the supply decreased. The 12TB EasyStore drive I bought from Best Buy went from regularly available for $ 219 to out of stock. It’s now priced at $ 339, but it’s currently only $ 309. It’s still too high of a cost per terabyte (at $ 25.75) for what I want to invest (which is ideally less than $ 20 per terabyte).

Trying to figure out how long the shortage and the price increases would last, I reached out to a few storage vendors to get their thoughts on Chia and its impact.

Larry O’Connor, CEO of Other World Computing (OWC) took a few minutes to explain how he and his company perceive Chia and the impact it has had not only on OWC, but on the storage industry as a whole. . O’Connor confirmed what I already knew: “The impact on the supply and cost of hard drives has been substantial.

At the time we spoke in mid-May, Chia’s network space was 6EiB – that’s Exbibytes – but as of July 8, it was hovering at 30EiB.

OWC

The start of the Chia network’s growth came almost simultaneously with Amazon’s $ 300 million purchase of high-capacity drives, according to O’Connor. A purchase that would “hamper the supply for 10 weeks to 14 weeks”.

Another aspect of Chia is that it uses consumer SSDs during the plot creation process, with each standard K32 plot writing up to 1.8TB of data to an SSD. Because of this, OWC and other SSD vendors have had to change their warranty and refund policies to prevent someone from buying a new SSD, burning it while tracing Chia, and then requesting a warranty exchange for the. replace, according to O’Connor.

As for getting back to normal, O’Connor told me that OWC hopes hard drive prices and supply stabilize after the summer, but even that was a hopeful guess.

Since our email exchange I have tested one of OWC’s 4-bay ThunderBay storage enclosures with 24TB total storage as well as a Mercury Elite Pro Quad four-bay storage enclosure with total 16TB of storage while growing Chia.

Screenshot by Jason Cipriani / ZDNet

In fact, I use the ThunderBay box in a variety of ways. Using the included license for SoftRaid, I configured the enclosure in a RAID0 configuration and allocated 21TB for Chia farming, 1.5TB for additional storage, and 1.5TB for TimeMachine backups on my MacBook Pro.

The ThunderBay has a Thunderbolt 2 connection, so you’ll either need to purchase a Thunderbolt 2 to Thunderbolt 3 USB-C adapter ($ 49 on Amazon) or have a PC with a Thunderbolt 2 port.

The Mercury Elite Pro uses a standard USB-C connection, so as long as your computer has a USB-C port, you’re good to go.

Both enclosures and the included drives were reliable and fast for my very small Chia farm. Response times to blockchain challenges are almost always less than a second, even if one of the boxes is set up as a remote harvester in a completely different room from my house.

At first I thought the constant noise from my office speaker fan would be too loud and annoying, but after a few days I hardly notice it anymore.

I will say that I want the Mercury Elite Pro to support daisy chaining like the ThunderBay case does.

OWC continues to have a stock of ThunderBay 4 enclosures, either alone or with drives already installed. You can get ThunderBay 4 configurations with a SoftRaid license to manage your storage from $ 669 for 4TB of storage, up to 72TB for $ 3,179.

The Mercury Elite Pro Quad starts at $ 199 for the case only, or you can go up to 72TB for $ 2,899.

I’m not entirely sure what the future holds for Chia, who coincidentally kicked off her official pooling protocol on Thursday, but it’s been a fun experience – and who, even if she fails, leaves me plenty of storage for backing up photos, videos or maybe starting a Plex service.

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