4 ms·

> Chia plotting is extremely I/O intensive and destroys most SSDs in under a few weeks Woah, really?

ev1 5y ago
Yes. The creation of the plot will eat through SSD TBW.
kevingadd 5y ago
Yes, presumably as a measure to make it harder to scale the plotting process (to make it more "fair"), it apparently does a ton of reads and writes across the whole region being plotted, so it will quickly exhaust the total number of write cycles available on the drive. A cheaper drive will be effectively destroyed (high quality drives can survive more write cycles, so they're comparatively okay.) I would have assumed it just linearly computed the whole plot to be farmed, but presumably that would make it vulnerable to some sort of attack where you create a "winning" plot on demand. You could theoretically plot on a RAMdisk to avoid this problem, but the necessary amount of RAM would be incredibly expensive, so it's unlikely that many people will do it. See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=twwyBdsRYL4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=twwyBdsRYL4
scohesc 5y ago
From what I understand, newer consumer level SSDs are designed to have a lower TBW (TeraBytes Written) - mostly because any reasonable consumer doesn't write terabytes of data to their SSDs in any decent length of time. Enterprise/Higher end "GaMeR" SSDs have higher TBW ratings - I believe 1TB FireCuda Model NVMe SSDs have something insane like a 1800 TBW rating when I was looking a couple weeks back. These above mentioned consumer drives, when written to in massive amounts (I believe even the lower sized Chia plots thrash the SSD to the tune of at least a couple terabytes of write usage) cause it to degrade at a significantly higher rate. Long story short, consumer SSDs aren't designed for super high write tasks, while enterprise and higher-end ones are.
- floatingatoll 5y ago
  What is the expansion of the acronym “GaMeR”? I’ve not seen it before and I want to be sure I understand.
  - unwind 5y ago
    It's not an acronym, it's the word "gamer" written in something akin to leetspeak [1]. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leet
  - plttn 5y ago
    They're just spongebob texting "gamer".
  - bcjordan 5y ago
    Believe it's use of Mocking Spongebob style https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/mocking-spongebob https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/mocking-spongebob
    - floatingatoll 5y ago
      Oh.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - tmathmeyer 5y ago
    its "gamer" like "video game player". not an acronym.
    - floatingatoll 5y ago
      That's incomplete, it turns out; apparently it's a weirdly capitalized form of "gamer" with sarcastic/disrespectful intent towards the referenced group.
  - cylde_frog 5y ago
    I think he's making fun of the over the top gamer branding some technology products have.
- ev1 5y ago
  > I believe 1TB FireCuda Model NVMe SSDs have something insane like a 1800 TBW rating when I was looking a couple weeks back. This is still only a couple hundred 100GB plots (the smallest possible size). "Chia SSDs" being made are something like 12000TBW.
- hogFeast 5y ago
  Firecudas are terrible for Chia. TBW doesn't matter as much as people think. Some of the lower TBW SSDs will outlast the higher TBW ones (again, Firecuda is an example of the latter). The standard plot size uses 1.2TB of writes. You won't wear out your SSD in a few weeks with Chia...you just won't. If you use a 120GB one, maybe...but no-one is doing this.
Glench 5y ago
Here's the official Chia answer to this: https://twitter.com/bramcohen/status/1393988621921701889 https://twitter.com/bramcohen/status/1393988621921701889
- mirthflat83 5y ago
  > For some odd reason the 'Chia burns out hard drives!' is getting repeated as the fashionable fud. No one is claiming that Chia is burning hard drives. He is intentionally being misleading. Chia absolutely destroys consumer SSDs.
  - retzkek 5y ago
    > Chia absolutely destroys consumer SSDs. If they are used to produce many orders of magnitude more plots than could fit on them. His point is you don't need SSDs to plot, and can reasonably make them directly on the spinning HDD on which you'll store them. I know, because I'm doing this. I make one plot in about 10 hours on the 7200rpm commodity drive in my home media server. It may take me longer to fill up my space than it would with an SSD, but compared to the amount of time in the future I'll be able to farm the plots it doesn't really matter. Cranking out plots as fast as possible probably only helped for the first week or two. People are burning out SSDs since they're buying into the arms race and trying to get/stay ahead of the netspace growth, hoping for some "easy" XCH, but that's a choice they're making, using poor (or more likely no) ROI calculations and outdated information.
  - killingtime74 5y ago
    He’s a sellout who premined a massive amount, of course he’s going to lie through his teeth
makomk 5y ago
Yes and no. As I understand it, there are two parts: you create plots which take up a certain amount of disk space, and then farm those plots indefinitely, and only the first plot creation part is extremely I/O intensive. So what a lot of people seem to be doing is creating the plots on SSDs and then moving them to cheaper spinning rust hard drives once created, and it's this that can apparently destroy consumer SSDs relatively rapidly (so long as you have much more storage used for Chia than the capacity of the SSD). I don't think just creating a plot or two in the spare space of your consumer SSD and leaving it there farming away would be a huge problem.

ev1 5y ago

Yes. The creation of the plot will eat through SSD TBW.

Yes, presumably as a measure to make it harder to scale the plotting process (to make it more "fair"), it apparently does a ton of reads and writes across the whole region being plotted, so it will quickly exhaust the total number of write cycles available on the drive. A cheaper drive will be effectively destroyed (high quality drives can survive more write cycles, so they're comparatively okay.) I would have assumed it just linearly computed the whole plot to be farmed, but presumably that would make it vulnerable to some sort of attack where you create a "winning" plot on demand. You could theoretically plot on a RAMdisk to avoid this problem, but the necessary amount of RAM would be incredibly expensive, so it's unlikely that many people will do it. See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=twwyBdsRYL4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=twwyBdsRYL4

scohesc 5y ago

From what I understand, newer consumer level SSDs are designed to have a lower TBW (TeraBytes Written) - mostly because any reasonable consumer doesn't write terabytes of data to their SSDs in any decent length of time. Enterprise/Higher end "GaMeR" SSDs have higher TBW ratings - I believe 1TB FireCuda Model NVMe SSDs have something insane like a 1800 TBW rating when I was looking a couple weeks back. These above mentioned consumer drives, when written to in massive amounts (I believe even the lower sized Chia plots thrash the SSD to the tune of at least a couple terabytes of write usage) cause it to degrade at a significantly higher rate. Long story short, consumer SSDs aren't designed for super high write tasks, while enterprise and higher-end ones are.

floatingatoll 5y ago
What is the expansion of the acronym “GaMeR”? I’ve not seen it before and I want to be sure I understand.
- unwind 5y ago
  It's not an acronym, it's the word "gamer" written in something akin to leetspeak [1]. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leet
- plttn 5y ago
  They're just spongebob texting "gamer".
- bcjordan 5y ago
  Believe it's use of Mocking Spongebob style https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/mocking-spongebob https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/mocking-spongebob
  - floatingatoll 5y ago
    Oh.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- tmathmeyer 5y ago
  its "gamer" like "video game player". not an acronym.
  - floatingatoll 5y ago
    That's incomplete, it turns out; apparently it's a weirdly capitalized form of "gamer" with sarcastic/disrespectful intent towards the referenced group.
- cylde_frog 5y ago
  I think he's making fun of the over the top gamer branding some technology products have.
ev1 5y ago
> I believe 1TB FireCuda Model NVMe SSDs have something insane like a 1800 TBW rating when I was looking a couple weeks back. This is still only a couple hundred 100GB plots (the smallest possible size). "Chia SSDs" being made are something like 12000TBW.
hogFeast 5y ago
Firecudas are terrible for Chia. TBW doesn't matter as much as people think. Some of the lower TBW SSDs will outlast the higher TBW ones (again, Firecuda is an example of the latter). The standard plot size uses 1.2TB of writes. You won't wear out your SSD in a few weeks with Chia...you just won't. If you use a 120GB one, maybe...but no-one is doing this.

Glench 5y ago

Here's the official Chia answer to this: https://twitter.com/bramcohen/status/1393988621921701889 https://twitter.com/bramcohen/status/1393988621921701889

mirthflat83 5y ago
> For some odd reason the 'Chia burns out hard drives!' is getting repeated as the fashionable fud. No one is claiming that Chia is burning hard drives. He is intentionally being misleading. Chia absolutely destroys consumer SSDs.
- retzkek 5y ago
  > Chia absolutely destroys consumer SSDs. If they are used to produce many orders of magnitude more plots than could fit on them. His point is you don't need SSDs to plot, and can reasonably make them directly on the spinning HDD on which you'll store them. I know, because I'm doing this. I make one plot in about 10 hours on the 7200rpm commodity drive in my home media server. It may take me longer to fill up my space than it would with an SSD, but compared to the amount of time in the future I'll be able to farm the plots it doesn't really matter. Cranking out plots as fast as possible probably only helped for the first week or two. People are burning out SSDs since they're buying into the arms race and trying to get/stay ahead of the netspace growth, hoping for some "easy" XCH, but that's a choice they're making, using poor (or more likely no) ROI calculations and outdated information.
- killingtime74 5y ago
  He’s a sellout who premined a massive amount, of course he’s going to lie through his teeth

makomk 5y ago

Yes and no. As I understand it, there are two parts: you create plots which take up a certain amount of disk space, and then farm those plots indefinitely, and only the first plot creation part is extremely I/O intensive. So what a lot of people seem to be doing is creating the plots on SSDs and then moving them to cheaper spinning rust hard drives once created, and it's this that can apparently destroy consumer SSDs relatively rapidly (so long as you have much more storage used for Chia than the capacity of the SSD). I don't think just creating a plot or two in the spare space of your consumer SSD and leaving it there farming away would be a huge problem.