Hi all, given the recent XCH prices.
Just wanna know the takes on expanding the hdd farm vs holding out.
How many of you plan to slowly expand HDD
vs
How many of you plan to just hold it out.
Planning on holding out at about 200tb, unless I find some fire sales on drives I can’t pass up. 
Thats about 2000 + plots on your end? Well done. Im around 1000+.
I Was looking at this as more of a hobbyist point of view instead of investment point of view based on current market standards…
I’m done with sinking money into it. I’ll just farm what I have plotted until now for maybe the next couple years.
Just added 2 more 8TB drives to my Synology/
Just bought 6x 5TB 2.5" HDDs for 18.84 € / TB. Can’t hold me back on this great offer…
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Definitely not buying new drives atm.
Considering hdd-prices, netspace, electricity-bill and ssd-wearout while plotting, I believe, buying xch would make more sense.
When official pools arrive, things might look different.
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Just unpacked the last few hdd’s, be done plotting by the weekend.
Not buying any new drives anymore, prices are way higher still than when I bought my current stock.
If I see a good deal come by I might, but the other thing is that I now have space for 20 drives with 18 now used, adding more will also cost more in terms of enclosures etc.
I don’t have the space to use external drives too much and they make too much noise.
In any case, I suspect to have to start replotting everything within a week or two, when all full again I will re-evaluate
Mathematically it is better to use the money and buy the chia currency directly than to buy HDD and SSD
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I hit my 20ish TB limit this time last week. I contemplated buying a few drives on Amazon Prime sale, but I could not justify sinking $70+ into 4/5TB USB HDDS. If they were all internal SATA and a little cheaper, I’d rebuild my RAID in a heartbeat and have a full 16TB/20TB RAID + the external drives. As it stands right now, I am happy with my 20TB worth of drives.
If I end up giving up before I win, so be it. If I end up switching to pooling when that comes out, I may get a starter 4/5TB USB drive to store pool plots exclusively to to test the waters and then replot what I have if it makes sense or not at that time.
For me it is about the HDD prices. Plus they are coming out with multi head drives which doubles speed at the current sizes but more importantly can sacrifice speed for more storage space. They double again since the standard is 1, 2, many and we get another Mores law wall to bang our heads against since double the heads gives double the head failure rate. One day it will be all biological and an HDD will look like the circle of life. Imagine a worm drive that is actually powered by a worm consuming the biproduct from the act of storing the data. Probably give it some water every now and again, because perpetual motion will never be a real thing. Machinery that gets stronger over time. This also stops people throwing money at something and being the new big dog on the block. If you want to be a race car driver, you adopt a car, feed it and exercise it race. Anyways, I’m a dreamer and this is my future. One where we aren’t born into wealth, we create it. Hence why I’m here.
just typed this and then thought, let’s have a look what hdd prices are doing at the moment. Well nice offer for 14TB Exos drives (external) @ 17 Eur/TB…so now I have 21 drives…still 30 days to change my mind though 
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I just filled my last hard disk making a total of 1320 k32 plots.
At present prices (hard disk and Chia) you pay back your HD investment in a bit more than a year (the best I can find are Hard disk prices at 25Eur/TB).
One month of farming and plotting and still 0 Chia earned.
My conclusion: I will stop buying Hard Disks and wait either for an increase in Chia price or a drop in HD prices. The economics are not favourable at this moment.
If I compare the Chia business with Ethereum mining the situation is practically the same. The present ROI of graphics cards is not much different, but at least you get instant gratification by joining one the pools available. Besides, since I started mining Ethereum in 2017 most of the Hardware has already paid itself. With EIP 1559 in mid July, Ethereum mining will take a hit.
Not sure what is the best strategy to follow
I just dropped off 80tb of unused drives to the postal service for return. I’ll buy myself a turbo and fuel system for my project car. At least that’ll be worth some money when it’s all said and done.
HDD practically is still faster roi than gpu. But i read that HDD lasts 3-5 years. If so, the lifespan is shorter than gpu. Gpu last at least 5 years or more, given you manage the gpu card at a acceptable temp range. Anyone can provide insights on HDD lifespan?
Also, for people who have 0 chia. The network is growing its no longer possible to win solo. An extremely low chance. You could join hpool and get a consistent payout. U can even check your earnings via hpool calculator.,
Withdrawal is 0.1 XCH. So every 0.1 XCH u immediately withdraw out.
The first time i won 2 XCH is when network was around 2 EIB, i haven won any since then till i joined hpool
You have to keep buying and replacing HDD at the same rate of growth as netspace. You can never stop or your income will drop to zero.
If today you earn 0.1 XCH (US$29) per month, you have to deduct the cost of electricity and use this amount to continue buying HDD.
If you take care of hard drives (keep them cool, clean and don’t bang them around) they will last a lot longer than you think. Also, by the time your 16Tb drive dies, it will cost pennies on the dollar to replace because the average drive at that time will be 5 times or more larger.
I agree. Unlike plotting, which heavily uses HD, the harvest hardly uses it. It will practically live forever.
0.1xch every 4 days for me.
Use the hpool calculator and check estimated profits based on your plots.
If HDD lasts practically forever,
What we need to replace is just the SSD
And to increase HDD over time. This ultimately is a winner here. Compared to Gpu’s
I have a few 80GB and 320GB SATA HDDs that are at least 15 years old. Although I don’t use them for anything, just keep them in storage, I expect if I needed them, they’d work just fine. Last I checked a few months ago, they are still going strong. Also, I have 2 original Apple branded 1TB HDDs. I got them with my 2012 Mac Pro and still use them alongside my SSDs (1SSD/HDD for Windows and 1 HDD/SSD for OSX).