Chinese Manufacturers Begin Production of Cryptocurrency Mining Dedicated SSDs As Chia Coin Gains Popularity

The rise in popularity of Chia Coin, a brand new cryptocurrency, is expected to cause major SSD & HDD shortages around the globe, as we reported yesterday. Given the increasing demand for SSD and high-performance storage devices, Chinese manufacturers have commenced production of mining dedicated SSDs which should be hitting retail soon.

Chinese Manufacturers Start Production of Dedicated Cryptocurrency Mining SSDs As Chia Coin Gains Popularity

The Chia Coin cryptocurrency was founded by the creator of BitTorrent, Bram Cohen. Unlike the traditional cryptocurrency algorithms which rely heavily on GPUs, Chia Coin relies on fast SSDs & HDDs. In short, its mining is mostly done on fast and high-capacity storage devices. Chinese retail segment is reporting that they are already facing huge shortages of high-capacity HDD and SSDs. 8 TB HDDs are already out of stock and it looks like even stock for lower capacity mainstream drives will soon be out depleted.

The mining process of Chia Coin requires a large amount of free space and runs several reading & writing operations. In this case, endurance (TBW) is equally as important as speed, so consumer SSDs aren’t the best choice for mining due to their lower endurance, and running these operations will significantly reduce the lifespan of an SSD. Hence, the target for these miners is primarily hard drives and data center SSDs.

Chinese storage and memory manufacturer, Jiahe Jinwei, has officially announced a new SSD mass production project which will offer dedicated cryptocurrency mining SSDs. The dedicated mining SSDs will primarily be targeted towards Chia Coin miners. It is unknown at the moment what kind of specifications these SSDs will boast but from the looks of it, they might be sold directly to miners instead of hitting the retail segment at all.

With that said, we should expect SSD and HDD prices to rise substantially in the months ahead as more and more miners hop on board the Chia Coin cryptocurrency bandwagon. The same Chinese manufacturer reports that its entire supply of high-capacity storage devices has already been sold out and the production had to be increased urgently.

As of right now, there are a total of 30,000 HDDs with a combined storage space of 260 Petabytes or (260,000 Terabytes) in the mining network and that’s increasing by an average of 500 HDDs per day.

Chia Network has stated that the Chia Coin crypto-currency has benefits over traditional coin models as it’s eco-friendly but on the flip side, consumers and data centers will soon see unavailability of another vital component of their PCs until global supply boost ups to carter both markets.

News Source: ITHome