Galax is now warning users on its Chinese website that mining cryptocurrency with the companies SSDs will void your warranty with that product. This comes as no surprise with miners getting ready to start farming the new Chia Coin cryptocurrency which focuses on storage to mine coins rather than requiring the best mining GPUs.
Chia is a very new cryptocurrency that isn't even available to trade just yet, but it's already gaining in popularity. The main attraction for this new crypto is the way you can mine the cryptocurrency. Chia relies on a 'proof of time and space' algorithm to mine the currency on hard drives and SSDs, so there's no need to optimize your GPU for mining. In fact, after you build the plots on a PC, you can use a Raspberry Pi to farm Chia Coin and save on electricity.
The developers of Chia designed Chia to be mined this way so mining the cryptocurrency is more accessible to the end-user and won't penalize you with big electricity bills or the purchasing of single-use hardware (i.e. ASICs). But, on the negative side of things, this mining technique could severely affect storage supply and demand.
If Chia gets popular at all, we will probably see the same shortages we're seeing on GPUs applied to hard drives and SSDs as well. At present, Chia already has over 950 petabytes of storage, consisting of 101.4GiB plots. That's a lot of hard drives and SSDs, and that space remains occupied as long as a miner wants to try to harvest Chia. And the cryptocoin isn't even a month old yet!
Given how much data writes it takes to create a Chia plot, it's no surprise that Galax is already preventing users from using their warranty on its SSDs when it comes to mining workloads. If Chia is demanding enough on write performance, we could see all other SSD manufacturers following suit.
