The mining craze has caused hard disk prices to rise and stocks to run out, and enterprise-level hard disks have become the main target of purchase

Recently, the hard drive mining situation has been booming, causing the value of hard drives to increase day by day. First, high-performance SSDs increased in price and were out of stock, then mechanical hard drives above 10TB increased in price and were out of stock, and now it has even affected 8TB and some 4TB products.

According to the Weibo account of Beijing Hard Drive House, the orders for large-capacity hard drives have skyrocketed in the past two days, with 582 units waiting to be shipped, and the price has even changed every hour. Many second-hand dealers have entered the market and are ready to speculate on hard drives, so the price of hard drives will not return to its original level in a short period of time.

New virtual currency appears, miners start to grab hard drives

The price increase of hard drives has a direct causal relationship with virtual currencies. Although many people believe that the cryptocurrency bubble will burst sooner or later, there are always people who want to jump in and make a fortune before it collapses. First, Bitcoin was wildly bullish, soaring nearly 6 times in the past six months; then, Musk endorsed Dogecoin, causing the price of Dogecoin to soar 7252%;

Now there is a new cryptocurrency called Chia on the market. Unlike Bitcoin and other currencies that rely mainly on computing power, Chia wins "rewards" by proving storage space. The larger the storage space, the higher the chance of getting rewards. So miners on the traditional cryptocurrency side are fighting for CPUs and graphics cards, while miners on the Chia side are fighting for hard drives.

In other words, a brand new cryptocurrency, using a brand new proof model that lowers the threshold for mining, and recently preparing to release the coins, the hard drives were sold out.

Hard disks become consumables, and enterprise-level products become the main purchase targets

More importantly, although Chia coins will not produce the terrible waste of electricity like Bitcoin, the proof process of Chia coins will generate a large number of read, write and delete operations, which will cause great damage to the hard disk. As long as the hard disk passes through Chia, it will soon be scrapped and cannot be reused, turning the hard disk into a short-term consumable.

In contrast, large-capacity solid-state drives are the best choice for high-speed cache for mining Chia coins, so they were sold out first, followed by large-capacity mechanical hard drives. These miners mainly bought enterprise-level and NAS-level products because the tight market supply also brought panic to ordinary people and triggered panic hoarding, so that surveillance-level, civilian-level and some 3.5-inch mobile hard drives also began to be out of stock.

Bitcoin plummets, virtual currency contracts liquidate over 49.3 billion

The current mining craze is mostly due to the fact that Bitcoin, as an industry bellwether, has been on a strong upward trend. However, at noon on the 18th, the price of Bitcoin suddenly plunged, falling by more than $11,000 at one point to $50,900, marking the biggest drop since April. Dozens of other major cryptocurrencies also plummeted, and only Dogecoin remained strong, rising 12.63% against the trend.

UAlCoin data yesterday showed that virtual currency contracts had a total liquidation of more than 49.3 billion yuan in one day, and more than 70,000 long positions were wiped out. A seller of mining machines in Huaqiangbei said that this situation is very common: "Surges and plunges are just common phenomena in the Bitcoin market. Some loyal Bitcoin supporters I know regard it as a hedge against value savings and inflation, but more people still think about speculation."

However, there are rumors that the U.S. Treasury will accuse multiple financial institutions of using cryptocurrencies for money laundering, and the Turkish Central Bank will ban the use of cryptocurrencies as a form of payment from April 30, citing the risk of "irreparable" losses and transaction risks posed by the anonymous nature of cryptocurrencies.

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