Struggling to find decent prices, thanks to Chia crypto mining? :'(

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Oct 22, 2019
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I can't find a decent price for a NAS drive nor external 8TB+ drive to save my life! Not to mention the overall lack of availability.

I've tried Amazon, NewEgg, Best Buy, and desperately eBay and Craigslist. WD Elements external drives have been gobbled up, and I am always aggressively outbid even on "used" ones sold on eBay. This is in stark contrast to when I could grab an 8TB WD Elements drive for $140 from Amazon not too long ago.


Then I noticed a peculiar description under some drives as they are listed on Amazon by a third-party seller (Hot Tech Deals):

chia-mining-amazon.jpg



So is this going to be a repeat of what happened to high-end gaming GPUs? Storage drive shortages and price hikes because there's some people trying to get rich mining for yet another crypto currency? "Proof of computing power" and now "proof of storage capacity?"

I heard China and parts of Europe were affected the most, but this is all still relatively new to me. What's going on? Is it most likely this will only last a few months or so, or will manufacturers like Western Digital and Seagate be unable to keep up with demand with their existing stock and production capabilities? Are we going to see a wave of refurbished and use drives flood the market if former Chia miners give up in their endeavors?
 
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ornias

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The same thing thats happening to GPU's:
More miners means more demand, means higher difficulty, leading to even more demand etcetcetc. Then people need to move to ASICS (which isn't possible in this case so i'm wary) and there is a sudden drop in demand and a flood of devices in the used market.

It's a self-sufficient piramidscheme without anyone on top of the piramid. It's serving no-one and it's a complete idiotic venture.

It's not really a "proof of storage capacity", it's in practice more a "proof of past compute power, stored on a harddrive".

Normally the flood happens when there is better technology to compute (see the drop after moving it ASIC's described earlier), sadly for us I don't really see a way out of this spiral, unless the governments of the world band together and put a nuke stop to crypto farming/mining/shitting. Simply because there is not storage alternative.

Luckily 3TB drives are still relatively cheap afaik
 

Etorix

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Is it most likely this will only last a few months or so, or will manufacturers like Western Digital and Seagate be unable to keep up with demand with their existing stock and production capabilities? Are we going to see a wave of refurbished and use drives flood the market if former Chia miners give up in their endeavors?
Nobody knows… But, unless the value of Chia collapses or the network spaces expands so much that small farmers are kicked out it may last.
When this ends the good news is that, while Bitcoin/Ethereum miners wear out the GPUs they hoarded, Chia farmers compute their "plots" on SSDs (wearing out the SSDs in the process…) and then store the result indefinitely on HDDs: Used HDDs from Chia farming will have months of spinning but not much in the way of writes—rather less stress than if the drives had been used in some ZFS NAS.
 

smcclos

Dabbler
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Jan 22, 2021
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I am dabbling in chia farming, and using my TrueNAS to assist. Yes hard drive prices will be going up, but I think there will be an increase in supply in a month. Here is how I see it.

-The most dedicated miner will be buying the largest, and most drives that they can afford, this will shrink the supply of those drive
-Any miner that can is filled to capacity (i.e. no more SAS / SATA ports) will be extremely eager to sell whatever drive that is not connected to a system in stead of letting sit on a shelf.
-Those drives will enter the market, and then purchased up by the miner that is willing to take a used less than largest drive out there.
-Continue the process

So what are we are left with is the miner community will be be buying up the largest drives, and selling the smallest drives, so 2, 3, 4, and I am guessing 5 TB drives will be coming on the market at some pretty good prices. Also it will level out. There will be a point where the demand for the largest drives slows, and then the prices for everything will be coming down.

What I don't think will be coming down for a while will be large NVME SSD disks, these are needed to generate the plots that are mined. The only issue is generating a plot generates an excessive amount of wear on the disk, to the point of exceeding its threshold, and if chia miner wants to continue to expand, will be purchasing another NVME SSD, so in this case they will be a consumable. I am sure that some miners will sell worn devices as used, but they shouldn't.

As it is, with my setup, I have 1 pool of 3TB drives and a second pool of 2TB drives. I am looking to expand my 1st pool, and then start replacing by looking at 4TB drives. I have no plans to build a new machine, but I am not the most dedicated chia miner I am just using spare space.
 

Murrmanone

Cadet
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May 22, 2021
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All this Crypto Crap wont work without electricity!
You cant buy meat, vegetables, or milk from a farmer with a laptop....
One could say that the reason why Crypto Currency was created is just to drive up electronic prices so the big guys can make fortunes....
Yea, you guessed it..... I do not like imaginary money.... Get rid of it, then their would not be Ransomware or Electronics Shortages!!!
 

danb35

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15,464
I do not like imaginary money
What about the pieces of paper in your wallet? What about the numbers in your bank account? What makes them anything other than imaginary?
 

AlexGG

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Dec 13, 2018
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So is this going to be a repeat of what happened to high-end gaming GPUs? Storage drive shortages and price hikes because there's some people trying to get rich mining for yet another crypto currency? "Proof of computing power" and now "proof of storage capacity?

I think yes, at least for a while. In Russia, HDD prices, for any capacity upwards of 8TB, have tripled and availability seems not that great either.
 

Etorix

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kherr

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May 19, 2020
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There's a worldwide CHIP shortage ..... it was starting when the virus stuff started and just exoculated it. If it requires chips ... there's a shortage of it ...
There's acres of unfinished cars that just need the electronics.
The home computer market is just a sliver of the pie. relief supposedly should stat coming in '22.
There's only a few manufacturers in the world and can take 2+ years to get a new facility on line.
 

ornias

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There's acres of unfinished cars that just need the electronics.
I don't understand why people fall so easy for the carcompany PR machine.
The Car issue is not the chip shortage, it is because all car manufacturers cancelled their orders/time at the fabs when covid hit, because they expected a drop in demand. That did not happen and Now they need to wait at the back of the cue like everyone else.

When there wouldn't be a chip shortage, they wouldn't magically in front of the fab que for 2021 either.
 
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Luckily 3TB drives are still relatively cheap afaik
According to this analysis, Chia has little impact on HDD prices… except for a limited segment of the market which is exactly what NAS users want

And that's the rub. :frown: There's much overlap between a Chia miner (who's not simply using spare, unused space) and a NAS owner who wishes to build or expand their storage capacity. The comments even rightly called out the analysis in your link, as 8TB+ drives (including externals) are indeed jumping in price across the board, not to mention greater scarcity and pushed-back availability.


Some interesting comments from the above link:
bigdragon said:
As the models in demand sell out and fail to get restocked, demand spreads to other models. The dominoes all fall in sequence. Same thing has played out in the GPU ecosystem. We've seen this in the past with shortages in RAM too, and also in industries such as building materials and food. The analysis is completely wrong. Prices will bump up for everything and stay there until companies increase output (which they probably won't).
PhilFrisbie said:
I guess the cost of the 4tb drives I use in home NAS servers that went from $60 each two weeks ago to $80 today is just my imagination. . .


Our HDD price analysis from earlier this week demonstrated that prices of midrange HDDs featuring a 6TB or 8TB capacity did not change significantly in recent weeks.
Analysis or not, the fact is that the same external drives that were easily obtainable from Amazon for $140 are now consistently above $200, and without the same ETA on delivery.
 
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Constantin

Vampire Pig
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May 19, 2017
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$390 for a 12TB drive (used) w/a 5-year warranty at goharddrive.com. Certainly higher than in the past...

I'm glad I have multiple 10TB spares here purchased last black Friday. Ditto a single spare 1.6TB S3610 for my sVDEV and a 64GB SATADOM. Plan for failure, just like insurance.
 

Etorix

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If you find Chia farmers who know their hardware well enough to know why they want Intel DC to plot, go ahead! In a gold rush, the one who are certain to get rich are those who sell tools to the gold diggers.
 
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