In Vietnam and worldwide, scoring a new graphics card like NVIDIA’s RTX 30 series or AMD’s RX 6000 has become nearly impossible. The crypto boom has miners buying GPUs in massive quantities, leaving gamers with cash but no stock to buy.
But it’s not just GPUs. Other PC parts like HDDs and SSDs are now facing severe shortages as crypto communities target them too. According to a recent report from HKEPC, crypto miners in China are buying up huge amounts of HDDs and SSDs to mine Chia, a rising cryptocurrency in China.
Chia is promoted as an eco-friendly cryptocurrency. Unlike Bitcoin and Ethereum, which require specialized ASIC machines or GPUs for mining, Chia lets users mine by using free space on storage devices like HDDs or SSDs.
Bram Cohen, the creator of Chia and BitTorrent developer, explains that SSDs and HDDs consume less power, cost less, and are more available than GPUs used for Ethereum mining.
Even though Chia isn’t officially listed for trading yet, miners in China have already spotted its potential. They’re spending big to buy up all available storage devices. Experts warn this craze could drive up the cost of storage upgrades for smartphones and PCs in the near future.
Bigger drives mean bigger profits
Mining Chia requires a lot of free storage space because the mining software performs many read/write operations. Simply put, the more free space on a drive, the more money miners can make.
Durability matters as much as speed here. Consumer-grade SSDs aren’t ideal for Chia mining due to their limited lifespan and heavy read/write cycles that wear them down quickly. Instead, miners target HDDs and enterprise-grade SSDs designed for data centers.
As a result, large-capacity drives from 4TB to 18TB have been snapped up by miners. In Hong Kong, this buying spree has pushed prices from 200 HKD (about 26 USD) to 600 HKD (around 76 USD).
Jiahe Jinwei, a major SSD manufacturer in China, announced that all their high-performance 1TB and 2TB NVMe M.2 SSDs under the Gloway and Asgard brands are sold out. The company is taking steps to prevent miners from bulk-buying consumer SSDs, while also boosting supply and developing storage solutions specifically for Chia mining.
If Chia officially launches, we could face serious shortages of HDDs and SSDs. Although SSDs aren’t efficient for Chia mining, uninformed buyers might still rush to buy them out of fear of missing out on this new crypto trend. This raises risks for secondary buyers who might end up with SSDs heavily worn down by mining’s intense read/write cycles.
Source: Wccftech
