There’s no doubt now that Chia kills drives. Everyone from Ars to TecRep has pointed that out. Enterprise SSDs in less than 90 days. Consumer disks in 20-30 days. Ouch.
Less than scientific; some time lapse videos on YT and DM show better lifespan for mechanical disks. Potentially a few years for expensive over the top hardened disks. So that 5200RPM Seeker may be worth it at $100 per TB.
And setting a drive to read only also shows promise.
And we’ve now seen floppy disc RAIDs over a USB translator using MSD and custom controllers built on Pi etc super-micros and SBCs. And they work.
So what’s next?
I wonder why nobody is discussing it others than to not boost pricing!
Whether you grew up with it or came of age, us 8-biters need only look to the past for inexpensive, mass storage.
Something else? TAPE! No, not LTO. That’s $80-$100 for 10-28TB. LTO’s file list system is too slow for chia.
I’m talking compact cassette and VHS! Hundreds of billions of them still exist. Millions are recycled or landfilled every year. VHS Collector estimates about 75% have visual details damage. My experience says It’s considerably higher, but the level of damage is so minor as to be non-noticeable to all but the highest level of analogue connoisseur.
But the vast majority of that “damage” is charge variance in the tape over time.
So… why not blank out tapes and use them as storage? Just like we used to. Be it CC or VHS? Using LTFS v1 or HPTS, the mounting process tells you exactly how much empty storage there is and moving on to the next “block” is instantaneous. Since both FSs use log after write retrieval is quite quick for winding tapes. They also use the equivalent of blank space end-of-track used for later tape song skips to make write block jumps.
Seriously, here’s an opportunity for reuse!
Something to ponder for the tinker types out there.
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