News Chia Coin Won’t Drive Up Most HDD Prices, Analysts Claim

[Admin]

Financial analysts consider the impact of the Chia craze on Seagate and Western Digital.

Chia Coin Won’t Drive Up Most HDD Prices, Analysts Claim : Read more

 

[bigdragon]

That's not how this works. As the models in demand sell out and fail to get restocked, demand spreads to other models. The dominoes all fall in sequence. Same thing has played out in the GPU ecosystem. We've seen this in the past with shortages in RAM too, and also in industries such as building materials and food. The analysis is completely wrong. Prices will bump up for everything and stay there until companies increase output (which they probably won't).

 

[velocityg4]

I think what he's talking about is prices for OEMs won't increase much. Which they probably won't, for now, as they have contracted rates and different distribution channels. Also these large drives are mostly going in business servers destined for datacenters. The bulk of the large drive market. You can just imagine how many Google or Amazon buys.

Even then every extra drive will go to the retail distributors and current business customers may not have much luck increasing their orders without a new contract. As it's no longer WD competing with Seagate for customers but the business customers competing with miners for anything they can get their hands on.

Pools are coming at the end of this month. Now people can start tossing on a bunch of 1TB to 5TB drives. They won't make the money the whales make with 2 PB arrays. But it'll be enough to make an extra $10 to $20 a day. Just like a lot of GPU miners who use just a few GPU.

Even with the big miners. If they can't get 10 to 16TB drives at a reasonable price. They can use more 4TB to 6TB drives. It just takes a bit more organization and time to manage more drives. But once it's going they can just sit back and relax. It's not like the additional power cost matters as the usage is negligible.

Just look at 8TB drives. They're already getting scarce.

While I haven't looked into secondary peripherals. This must be or at least will be affecting prices and availability of those too. Items like power strips, long USB cables, USB hubs, cheap SATA raid cards, 5.25 to 3.5 bay adapters and multi-drive enclosures. I'll bet computer case manufacturers are shocked at the sudden resurgence of old ugly full tower cases that house 10+ 3.5 hard drives.

As Chia is proving a hit. This is just the beginning. There'll be a ton of copycat crypto's.

 

[PhilFrisbie]

I guess the cost of the 4tb drives I use in home NAS servers that went from $60 each two weeks ago to $80 today is just my imagination. . .

 

[InvalidError]

That's not how this works. As the models in demand sell out and fail to get restocked, demand spreads to other models. The dominoes all fall in sequence. Same thing has played out in the GPU ecosystem. We've seen this in the past with shortages in RAM too, and also in industries such as building materials and food. The analysis is completely wrong. Prices will bump up for everything and stay there until companies increase output (which they probably won't).

The bulk of HDDs are sold direct to large corporations, which means Chia miners don't even have the option to interfere with supply there no matter how much money they may want to throw at it. This is quite different from GPUs where higher-end consumer GPUs would normally go practically exclusively to gamers.

I wouldn't worry at all about Chia miners snatching 1-6TB HDDs any time soon if ever, though there could be a price increase in the longer-term as HDD manufacturers re-allocate materials and manufacturing capacity from smaller low-margins drives to higher capacity higher-margins drives.

I wonder how long it will be until people realize that Chia mining isn't really any more environmentally friendly than BTC or ETC. It may not require the same amount of always-on brute-force number-crunching but it does require a never-ending amount of storage, replacement SSDs for plotting and enough number-crunching to fill that storage as fast as it can be deployed.