In the current global semiconductor crisis, it’s extremely hard to get our hands on even a single Nvidia GeForce RTX 30 series graphics card. and to top it all the growing threat from Cryptominers is making it almost impossible for the gamers to procure even a single GPU.
It’s not just the Nvidia graphics cards, even AMD’s latest Radeon RX 6000 series card is also extremely hard to get at the actual MSRP. However, it seems that our troubles are just about to increase. According to the latest sources, the shortage of components is now about to hit Hard drives and SSD makers as well.
It’s not that there is a shortage of components which is used to manufacture the storage modules, instead, the problem might be caused yet again due to crypto mining. A new emerging cryptocurrency, Chia, is mined with storage space and miners in China are buying up hard drives and SSDs at an alarming rate.
The new Chia cryptocurrency is unlikely any other cryptocurrency, it relies heavily on storage space in hard drives and SSDs. Bitcoin relies on a proof of work model whereas Chia relies on a proof of space and time model. The man behind Chia is Bram Cohen, the creator of BitTorrent, and he wants to use the available space on storage devices for his cryptocurrency since SSDs and hard drives consume less power, are cheaper, and readily available compared to the power-hungry and hard to find GPUs used to mine Ethereum. Plus, he stated that the major motivation behind created Chia was to make a more environmental-friendlier cryptocurrency.
Coming back to our estimation that the Hard disk and SSD supply could see be running low, is mainly because miners are going out and buying all the storage devices they can even though it hasn’t been listed for trading yet.
The mining process of Chia requires a large amount of free space and runs many reading and writing operations. For the mining of the currency, endurance is equally as important as speed, so consumer SSDs aren’t the best choice for mining due to their lower endurance. And as always running mining operations will significantly reduce the lifespan of an SSD. therefore, the target for the miners of Chia is hard drives and data center SSDs.
According to sources, miners have been purchasing massive amounts of hard drives ranging in capacity from 4TB to 18TB. Jiahe Jinwei, a big SSD manufacturer in China, has reported that all of its Gloway and Asgard high-performance 1TB and 2TB NVMe M.2 SSDs are out of stock. The company stated that it will take appropriate steps to tackle the miners and prevent them from buying large amounts of consumers’ SSDs while also increasing their supply and developing mining-specific drives.
