With self-encrypting drives, you can basically instantly wipe the data and repurpose the drive for something else. I’ve talked to experts in the field, and I’ve done a lot of work myself on sanitization and secure erase and self-encrypting drives. On the other hand, millions of hard drives get shredded each year, mostly by hyperscale data centers because end customers don’t want their data “getting out,” which is silly. So we don’t believe there’s a large contribution from us in that area. Most of them last five to 10 years as well. They’re light and they don’t contain too many hazardous materials, comparatively. I talked to some e-waste facilities, and the amount of e-waste that SSDs create is small compared to other component parts, which is why SSD companies haven’t been attacked for e-waste before. I’ve learned a lot about e-waste in the last few weeks. Q: So, do you believe the e-waste argument is misplaced? If we created 44,000 extra failures, and that’s the high end, we’d only be contributing 1.5% of total failures. Even in a best case scenario, I calculated there were probably 2.5 million SSD failures in 2021. With that many drives, how many SSD failures should we expect per year in total? We know the annualized failure rates, so it’s easy to figure out. In 2021, there were 435 million SSD units shipped. So, I think 44,000 drives is a high estimate. There are 50 or 60 providers who will just plot for you, likely using enterprise SSDs. That’s a smart way to use new SSD drives-you get maximum use out of the hardware.Ĭompanies are also offering plotting as a service. We’ve also seen people plot on a consumer drive until it reaches a percentage of its useful life and then use it for something else. For the most part, I expect people have been doing their own research and buying the appropriate drives. That seems high to me because I think consumers are smart. With 32 exabytes of Netspace, my math shows Chia wore out about 44,000 drives. I used the endurance calculator that I wrote for Chia on the wiki, which estimates how many plots you can write until the drive wears out. So, how many SSDs are we burning out? I erred on the side of caution and assumed that 50% of the Netspace was farmed using consumer SSDs. We did a lot of internal analysis to see if that was true, because we take it very seriously. Q: That was a question we had, because Chia got a lot of backlash about people burning out consumer SSDs. There has been a ton of community development in Chia plotters since the launch to further improve the performance and efficiency. It’s still not a very friendly workload for consumer SSDs, and we definitely did not want people buying consumer SSDs and accidentally wearing them out for Chia. Over the year, we got it down to about 1.3TB of writes, which is what it takes today. Q: What was the outcome of that work to optimize the software?
Chia is an intersection of my primary expertise of storage, data centers, and cryptocurrencies-it was a natural fit, and I joined the team in May 2021. It’s going to obliterate consumer SSDs.” Prior to joining Chia, when I was at Intel, I did a lot of work on SSD endurance, so I helped Chia understand the software and how to optimize it for SSD endurance over the course of the year. I messaged the Chia president, saying, “You can’t release this software now. At that time, the alpha version of the Chia plotter wrote six times more data than it writes today. It was right in the middle of COVID, so instead of traveling for work frequently, I built Chia farms in my garage and talked to a bunch of strangers on Keybase all night. I was involved in the beta about a year ago. So we gathered a few questions and sat down with him to learn more about what he sees on the horizon and what a wild ride it’s been so far.Įditor’s Note: This interview has been edited for length and clarity. Jonmichael Hands, the VP of storage business development at Chia, reached out offering to discuss our post, and we figured he’d be a good guy to ask. It’s now hovering between 31 and 33 exabytes, leaving us, and we presume a lot of other people, wondering what the future looks like for this cryptocurrency. At the time, it was increasing by about 33% each week. The Chia Netspace slowed its exponential climb since we ran the post. In the end, it didn’t work for us, but our analysis isn’t the last word-we’re as curious as the next person as to what happens next with Chia. Our explanation was pretty simple: We agreed we weren’t in the game of currency speculation, so we just took the value and Netspace at the time and ran some math. A few weeks ago we published a post about why Backblaze chose not to farm Chia in our storage buffer.
0 kommentar(er)
