SSD designer Galax has warned users on its Chinese website that mining cryptocurrency with the company’s Solid State Drives (SSDs) will void their warranty with that product. This comes as no surprise with miners getting prepared to start mining the new Chia cryptocurrency which focuses on storage to mine coins rather than requiring the best mining GPUs.
“If users use our SSDs for mining/farming and other abnormal operations, the data writing volume is much higher than the standard for daily use, and the SSD will slow down or get damaged due to excessive data writing volume. Due to the tests carried out, the damages are qualitative according to the test results, and that is why according to the quality assurance standards of our SSDs, we have the right to refuse to provide warranty services. The right of final interpretation belongs to the company, " Galax published a note on their website.
Chia is a 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.
The makers of Chia designed it to be mined this way so mining the cryptocurrency is more accessible to the end-user and won't penalize the customer 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.
Given how much data write is required to design 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.