Chia miners are dumping hardware

[Yorick]

Looks like the chia craze is over, for now: https://wccftech.com/beware-chia-co...d-new-on-online-marketplaces-as-coin-crashes/

That site isn’t the most trustworthy. I wonder whether “a standard 1 TB HDD would last 10 years with normal usage but with Chia Coin mining, it would last only 80 days.” is anywhere near the truth and if so, why.

Be a little cautious if buying used; and prices for new gear should get back down to more reasonable levels again.

 

[AlexGG]

SSD will probably be burnt out, but a rotational hard drive will be quite all right. Chia mining does not put a lot of stress on the slow spinning storage.

 

[HoneyBadger]

Watch out for extremely burnt-out SSDs that were used for plotting, but HDDs used purely for farming should be just fine.

I wonder whether “a standard 1 TB HDD would last 10 years with normal usage but with Chia Coin mining, it would last only 80 days.” is anywhere near the truth and if so, why.

Maybe if the HDD was used for plotting, with the random I/O causing a lot of actuator wear, although that would have been a brutally slow process and likely nothing more than an exercise in frustration - which makes me question whether the author really understands the process or if they're just writing the article for clicks.

XCH to the floor baby!

 

[Etorix]

I doubt that the craze is fully, definitely over.
But anyway the quote is plain wrong. Chia farming just reads the drives; it is no more stressful on HDDs than using then in our NAS—and actually less stressful if the NAS does any significant write activity and/or does ZFS scrubs. The site IS untrustworthy on this.
The warning can only apply to SSDs which have ben used to plot using the traditional method: That could indeed wear out a regular consumer SSD in a few months. Data-center grade SSD should be able to take the abuse. (And any SSD used for plotting with the Madmax algorithm would probably be mostly fine at this point, but that's way beyond the level of detail one may expect from a seller.)

TL;DR Be very cautious buying second-hand large capacity (consumer) SSDs right now. For second-hand HDDs, do as usual.