Chia Mining Craze Easing, But HDD Pricing Still Rising

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HDD pricing is down from May, but still high

Toshiba
(Image credit: Toshiba)

The Chia Coin cryptocurrency craze led to an almost immediate shortage of many popular hard drives, and the resulting price hikes were intense. Now Chia appears to be slowing down, which should result in reduced demand for high-capacity HDDs and high-endurance SSDs. We examined how the slowed Chia expansion and improved HDD supply have affected retail HDD pricing, but while some pricing has come down over the last month, it turns out that most drives are still selling far over their MSRP. In some cases, pricing has even increased. 

The Chia-driven storage crisis unfolded at breakneck speed. In just about a month, from late April to early June, the space allocated to the Chia network increased from 1 exabyte to 16 exabytes. Since the largest HDD makers sell only 30% to 40% of their products via distributors and retailers, the steep increase in demand immediately caused a shortage, and pricing skyrocketed.

Anton Shilov
Anton Shilov
Contributing Writer

Anton Shilov is a contributing writer at Tom’s Hardware. Over the past couple of decades, he has covered everything from CPUs and GPUs to supercomputers and from modern process technologies and latest fab tools to high-tech industry trends.

3 Comments Comment from the forums
  • mogster
    Why did you only look at internal drives? External drives like WD's Elements/Easystore can be easily shucked and used internally for Chia storage, or even used as-is once plotting is complete.
    Reply
  • vmem
    mogster said:
    Why did you only look at internal drives? External drives like WD's Elements/Easystore can be easily shucked and used internally for Chia storage, or even used as-is once plotting is complete.

    Great point! I'll first admit that I am one of those WD element shuckers and have been using them to fill my synology unit for years now

    That aside, I'll attempt at responding to your point. Harddrives all cause vibration and those vibrations add up if you attempt to mount a bunch of them on a shelf or rack. If you put enough of them together, their vibrations will eventually add up to a harmonic wave shaking the entire rack and dramatically increasing the failure rate of your drives (so a lot of antivibration work will be needed). the failure point for consumer drives is around 5-10 drives, whereas with purpose built internal drives that failure point tend to be a lot higher with built in vibration resistant mechanisms inside of the drives.
    Reply
  • dvnwllms
    vmem said:
    Great point! I'll first admit that I am one of those WD element shuckers and have been using them to fill my synology unit for years now

    That aside, I'll attempt at responding to your point. Harddrives all cause vibration and those vibrations add up if you attempt to mount a bunch of them on a shelf or rack. If you put enough of them together, their vibrations will eventually add up to a harmonic wave shaking the entire rack and dramatically increasing the failure rate of your drives (so a lot of antivibration work will be needed). the failure point for consumer drives is around 5-10 drives, whereas with purpose built internal drives that failure point tend to be a lot higher with built in vibration resistant mechanisms inside of the drives.
    You'd have a point about "purpose built drives" except for the fact that shucked Element/EasyStore drives are literally WD Red drives meaning they have identical vibration protection. Chia miners have obviously taken to the shuck method because seemingly even more so than normal HDDs the prices have moonshot. Look at shucks.top for reference.
    Reply