I appreciate seeing this thread bumped. Not sure where the added comments are headed though. I think until we have more time farming Chia, nobody can say 100% what the lifetime of any of these drives is going to be. The statistical lifetime? That’s fallacy in my books. The projected lifetime? It’s great on paper. I will remain cautious on Chia farming and what it will do or not do to HDD longevity. The jury is still out in my books. When people here talk about make sure you get drives with warranty? Says they might be a bit leery about what a drive should do vs. what it will do. You can ride a horse that in theory should be able to run 1/2 way across the country. Thing is, nobody rode the horse across the country. As people did, their horses started dropping like flies about 1/6 way into the journey. So once people put the theories into practice, they soon realized the theory meant nothing. This was a fictitious story, for those keeping score at home.
I am waiting for my second power meter and will give idling drives a chance using two half dead 6 TB hdds…
In 5 years our drives will be worth a fraction of todays price, that’s for sure. Of course spinning up and down drives will reduce lifetime and the drive could die after just 1-2 years. If the small drive is cheap enough the value lost with the big drive could be bigger than the price of the small drive.
What I read is that drives report 0% lifetime remaining spin-up cycles when you hit 200.000 cycles.
If the drive does spin up every time a plot passes a filter you should see more spin-up cycles:
8640 challenges / day * 10 plots * 1/512 filter = 168,75 times a plot passes a filter on a 4 TB drive. Not sure how you end up with only 50. Maybe my math is flawed? Let’s see what numbers I will get with my 6 TB drives…
Even with that numbers it’s 1185 days… seems fine if the drive was cheap or is worth close to nothing like my 6 TB drives.
Do I actually have someone in my corner on this subject? I’ve grown accustomed to being a lone voice in this land of “go big or go home”. Like installing solar panels, you don’t want stuff to break prior to enjoying the promised land. It’s like spend big now to save later, but the later gets even later (and harder) because you need to fix or buy replacement parts. Many a person has died on that road to ROI. Perhaps like finding the end of the rainbow. It’s just right around the corner! I see the ROI, it’s right there. No! It’s over there now. Let me go chase it! Rinse. Repeat.
My drives all spin 24/7. its that shut down and spin up that might kill them.
Do you pay for your electricity?
No it’s like spend big now (get creative aka. idle disks) or loose money right from the start.
Most here pay enough for energy that running a 4 TB or smaller is a losing business.
If you don’t pay for energy… have fun with small drives.
I haven’t read the entire thread, but I can say that I have many, many smaller 2.5" USB drives, mainly 5TB but a few 4TB ones too, which I bought in bulk with a hefty discount from a wholesale IT supplier in the UK (it helps when you work in the industry…).
So for me, £/TB is king at the moment. I have many other drives with the largest capacity at present being 16TB.
And no, at present I don’t pay for my electricity as I am in a serviced office with all insclusive fixed costs.
Things may change of course, and if and when they do I may elect to resell some of the smaller drives (potentially at a profit over the price I paid for them…!) and move to larger capacity, fewer drives.
Although most people situations will be very similar, and the most efficient way is to use larger drives, in some niche cases other situations work.
I keep telling people to run that power cord to the house next door 
The fact that electricity keeps getting brought up for this PoST POW is actually laughable to me. I’ll state this again. If you live in a region where hard drive farming power charges are “excessive”, then POW isn’t for you. If you have expensive power then too bad. Thems the brakes. Talking about power consumption of hard drives while farming Chia is like splitting the hair that has already been split. It’s like the asinine solar panel debate. You spend your 10K now to save money at some point. If you can’t find numbers that work for buying drives that’s your problem. The last thing I will do is debate hardware for POW with someone who is dealing with expensive power fees. Well duh. Yeah, power is EVERYTHING but so what? Let me restate. If you pay a lot for power, WTF are you involved with a POW crypto? Seems unethical to me. It would be like living in a part of the world where there are shortages of water, yet you have some “thing” whereby you dump water down the drain. POW isn’t for everyone. If hard drive power consumption is your be all end all, then you need a subsection to discuss your various plights.
I live in a shared house with a 15 sqm bedroom. The I have two towers farming loaded with HDDs. Space does count. Get over it.
I pay 36 cents per kWh and POW is still profitable. Electricity is abundant. It is just expensive. Your reasoning is flawed.
There are plenty of really dumb business models. If you create a business that relies on water in a part of the world that has a shortage of water then don’t waste my time. I don’t have time for idiotic discussions. Find similar folk in a similar “plight”. The world works this way. Lots of supply = cheap. Less or harder supply = expensive. You don’t get expensive power when the there is a lot of supply of power. This applies to everything. I had a couple really basic ground rules on this discussion. I’m not interested in fringe points of view. Share those with other fringe farmers. Again, I question the ethics of doing POW when your area of the world charges high rates for power usage. A bit selfish in my opinion. But frankly speaking, you wouldn’t be alone. Go ahead and talk amongst yourselves about hardware choices. I have no interest in that thanks. Just because you can do something doesn’t mean you should.
And there’s me thinking Chia was Proof of Space, clearly you are lecturing people when you don’t know what you’re talking about.
I pay £0.29 per kWh, yet Chia is still profitable for me. I also have solar panels, have had since 2015, and they’ve almost paid for themselves. I’m actually looking at installing more, and batteries as well.
I have however turned off my POW NiceHash rig, as it isn’t cost effective any more.
What does any of that have to do with the subject at hand. Congrats on your power costs. Lots of people think that the restaurant business is wise. How many restaurants go out of business? Point being? Just because you decided something is/was a smart move doesn’t make it so. I love the “almost paid for themselves” aspect of selling yourself on your own choices.
On a side note, POS…industry wide is proof of stake. Look on any official Chia documentation and it should say PoST. Ask Bram. He doesn’t leave out the “T” which stands for time. It’s his project. People can call it PoS or POS if they want. I think it’s dumb to do that, but that’s just my opinion.
Ok, that’s it. I stop any attempt to exhange arguments in this thread. Valid arguments for going big have been given without a reasobable counter argument from OP. The OP is obviously only interested in wasting our time.
There is no fee to debate. There are no signed documents saying you need to post in this thread. That said, I am deeply saddened that you decided to disengage.
I’ll accept I got the meaning of POS wrong, but I’m absolutely correct about my solar panels, I receive the cheques four times a year based on what we generate, regardless of whether we use it or not, I’m paid for every kwh generated. I know how much I’ve generated, how much I’ve exported and therefore exactly how much I’ve used. So then it’s just a case of checking past bills to see how much a unit was, and therefore how much I’ve saved off our electric bill. I don’t need to sell it to myself, I know the cold hard facts, and with rising prices that investment will pay for itself sooner, then it’s pure profit, that’s guaranteed to keep rising. Don’t believe me lookup UK FITS payment
Chia on the other hand may never ROI, if that’s the case it won’t be the first time I’ve lost money on something, but I’m comfortable with that, and that lost money won’t cause me any hardship.
You won’t win, I’ve tried, but the OP reminds me of a young inexperienced person, not open to others ideas or arguments, they are right, end of.
I think I made one mistake in this thread. The audience here are the original farmers. These are the people who started to buy hardware when Chia price was about three times or four times higher than it is now. Nobody likes to admit a mistake. Of course everybody is going to defend their decisions. When I think about it, this discussion was more geared towards people who would be starting out with Chia at the value it is. Also this is not about building a 300 TB farm out of 3 TB hard drives. It’s about cost being the barrier to entry. A lot of people will look at the time for an roi and not enter chia farming. If you look at netspace that speaks volumes. So ultimately this is the wrong audience for this kind of discussion. And I will repeat until I’m blue in the face, that hard drives are power efficient. As a category they are power efficient. Yes we could debate the minutiae of this drive being more power efficient than that drive. But as Mr personality pointed out in his video, he suggesting that the drives are inactive 99.7% of the time while farming. So to me it just seems that the only counter-argument is the power usage which to me is a farce for most people involved with a POW crypto. And I’m definitely not speaking to the fringe who have expensive power and want to engage in a POW blockchain. The issues about space, again this is not about a 300 TB farm. This is about building a cheap farming operation that will get you a ROI faster. If the lifespan of the hard drive can’t Outlast the so-called power savings, then it’s just a dumb thing to be discussing. After all, we’re talking about the difference between the two drives sizes. I always say the difference between little A and little B is still considered little. Further to that, nobody’s actually come up with any data about actual cost differences or how more outrageous it is on a smaller drive especially when you take into account how much more expensive a new hard drive would be with a warranty or if you roll the dice on a big hard drive with no warranty that’s used.