There are various types of cryptocurrency in the market today. Bitcoin is kind of out of reach for a lot of people due to the fact that it is so expensive, and the cost of mining for it might actually not be so worth it, so you can imagine that people are constantly looking for the next best thing. One of those is called Chia, also known as a Burstcoin.
Unlike bitcoin that might require miners to own expensive and powerful PC components like GPUs, Chia only requires fast SSDs. This is because it uses high-speed SSDs to help “plot” the available space, but unfortunately if you were excited at the prospect of mining for Chia, think again. This is because according to Tom’s Hardware, using regular consumer-grade SSDs might be the worst thing you could do.
This is because at the intensity it is mined at, it seems that mining for Chia could wreck an SSD in over a month. To give you some context, a regular 1TB SSD comes with 600TBW of endurance which is roughly 0.3 drive writes per day, meaning that it should last you about 5 years. Mining for Chia, would shorten that lifespan to about 40 days.
This means that if you’re serious about mining for Chia, you would need high endurance SSDs, but unfortunately such components tend to be marketed towards datacenters and are priced very high. This could end up being a similar situation for bitcoin, where mining for it could end up costing you more in terms of components and utilities than what you get in return.
Filed in . Read more about Cryptocurrency and Social Hit. Source: tomshardware