Chia is a blockchain technology that relies on “farming” large storage capacity. Let’s discuss details of this use case and how it could potentially become a niche in HDD market.
Requirements:
Must be on 24/7, drive spinning all the time
Must allow for a decent random read seek time (comparable with modern HDDs)
Low cost per TB
Nice to haves:
As high capacity per unit as possible
As high capacity per watt as possible
Low energy usage, low noise, low vibration, low TDP
The drives will be filled up with “plots” - large files, intended to stay there for years (up to 5-10 years or until device failure), then will be connected to a “farmer” machine that will run them spinning 24/7 and performing random reads at a very low rate.
This use case is somewhat comparable to “cold tier” archiving, except that tape drives do not provide necessary random read performance.
Current Products on the Market
Right now, the best capacity HDDs are 18TB. While they fulfill requirements of 24/7 usage and having great read speeds, their other parameters are overkill for Chia use case:
High sequential write speed is just a “nice to have”, because writing will be done very rarely (ideally only once in the device lifetime)
Cache size is somewhat irrelevant, because there will not be significant I/O that can hit the cache
7200 RPM produces undesired noise, heat and vibration
The 5400 RPM drives currently available on the market are capped to lower capacity, therefore they are not the best choice in terms of TB per Watt and TB per Unit. We would gladly buy one 24 TB drive with 3000 RPM (nobody makes such drives at the moment) instead of two 12 TB drives 5400 RPM, at same cost per TB
All high capacity devices on the market today are intended for NAS or Enterprise use. Chia is neither. The smallest farmers are just enthusiast consumers who build their farm at their residential space. Besides cost/investment criteria, physical noise level and heat, and electricity bill are important factors for an effective small farm.
My news feed keeps telling me that seagate is releasing a 20TB drive soon. Probably not for chia farming lol. But maybe it’ll bring down the price of 18TB and 16TB drives… hopefully.
To develop a drive for our specific use-case could take years. In the meantime we work with whats available.
That same new feed said that they could easily release even higher capacity drives, but there was no need (!!!???). I think it’s their reluctance to cut into their revenues of lesser drives that’s keeping the TB/drive down. Reminds me of Intel and their reluctance to actually improve the CPU performance leterally for years…(rather than just update their CPUs with a new naming) before AMD gave them a shot up the yingyang with Ryzens and Threadrippers. Perhaps someone will decide to do something similar and get a jump on the evolving marketplace for hi-cap drives, or at least it’s a pleasant thought!
It’s funny, up until I started this whole Chia farming thing I thought 4TB was ‘big’, and $80 was expensive for a hard drive. High cap drives were never really meant for consumer-level guys. Chia changed that for me. But for most people, I don’t think there is a demand for ‘high’ capacity drives.
I remember 10 years ago buying a huge 500 GB external hard drive, and thinking “I’ll never fill this thing up”. Now I’m sitting here with 90 TB wanting more
What’s even more amazing, is that old tech is filling the need for space. One would imagine that digital bit and bytes would so easy to mass produce by now that HDs would be a museum item in 2021! But no, it’s the opposite. Slow mechanical drives are winning the space race.
I want every HDD manufacturers, and SSD for that matter, to make sure that their products will work 100% on Linux since I currently plot and farm on Linux.
