To be fair, there's the plotting phase, and the farming phase. When farming, disk speed is not critical, just size. Thus the idea of recycling millions of HDDs

To be fair, there's the plotting phase, and the farming phase. When farming, disk speed is not critical, just size. Thus the idea of recycling millions of HDDs in a low power scenario. A few seeks here or there on your old, unused terabytes, but you need to have enough space to offer, otherwise your chances are zero. Today's farming is dominated by pools, some using non-official, closed source binaries of unknown origin. Official pooling is, supposedly, coming soon. Plotting, which is preparing the files that are farmed, is, as of today, extremely IO intensive, but still cheaper, energy-wise, than mining. A single 100GB plot (you need ~20TB to have any chances of farming success) can take hours to plot. So people are resorting to extremely fast SSDs, or NVMe in RAID0 in PCIe 8x/16x cards to slash that time. And, in the process, wearing them out. Can't find the link now, but some were saying normal SSDs are ruined after 6 weeks of 24/7. Plotting keeps improving, although I'm not sure if it's got a lower performance bound by design.