storage gold rush?

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Layla

Game Engine Developer
Jun 21, 2016
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Is it any different/better/worse than using tons of electricity that comes from burning oil or horribly sooty coal to power bitcoin miners and the pollution that comes with it that statistically causes many deaths per year?
You're off to a bad start when you're saying is it any less ethical than this other horribly unethical thing. Bitcoin is awful, too! And is it better? I'm not sure. You realize that these physical goods take energy AND materials to produce, right? And those materials take a lot of energy to mine, refine, and turn into something as complex as an SSD (and then that thing gets packaged and shipped across the world by planes, trains, ships and trucks), right?

I'm not even sure it's not worse than Bitcoin. They're all terrible. Bitcoin uses tons of energy directly. Chia will eventually use maybe as much by using tons of energy indirectly AND destroying lots of non-recycable goods in the process AND causing large shortages which will harm people in other ways downstream. Bitcoin ASICs are also likely useless outside Bitcoin, so it is also destroying some other resources that way. It's really just all horrible and everyone participating to make a buck is really horrible.
 

EffrafaxOfWug

Radioactive Member
Feb 12, 2015
1,394
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If I fudged the math I am sure someone will point it out.
A lot of the TBW ratings are going to be based on "average" usage patterns; random small writes are pretty much the worst-case scenario for SSDs due to the way NAND works - you have to do a read-modify-write on the entire NAND block which may be considerably larger than your average 4k page/sector. As such there's potentially an order of magnitude's difference in SSD wear between 1TB of sequential writes as opposed to 1TB of random writes.

https://www.techspot.com/news/89626-chia-farming-can-reportedly-destroy-512gb-ssd-40.html]Canary in the coal mine posts I've read say there's plenty of people already burning out their SSDs in very short order; that might be only for rubbish-tier QLC desktop drives but it still seems like burning money and buying tulips to me. Seems like if we can't invent a war to destroy a bunch of resources, we'll invent other ways to do it instead...
 
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amalurk

Active Member
Dec 16, 2016
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You're off to a bad start when you're saying is it any less ethical than this other horribly unethical thing. Bitcoin is awful, too! And is it better? I'm not sure. You realize that these physical goods take energy AND materials to produce, right? And those materials take a lot of energy to mine, refine, and turn into something as complex as an SSD (and then that thing gets packaged and shipped across the world by planes, trains, ships and trucks), right?

I'm not even sure it's not worse than Bitcoin. They're all terrible. Bitcoin uses tons of energy directly. Chia will eventually use maybe as much by using tons of energy indirectly AND destroying lots of non-recycable goods in the process AND causing large shortages which will harm people in other ways downstream. Bitcoin ASICs are also likely useless outside Bitcoin, so it is also destroying some other resources that way. It's really just all horrible and everyone participating to make a buck is really horrible.
Slow down, I don't disagree with you that all this is bad stuff. I just am not sure using up SSDs is worse than all the coal being burned for bitcoin.
 

Layla

Game Engine Developer
Jun 21, 2016
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Slow down, I don't disagree with you that all this is bad stuff. I just am not sure using up SSDs is worse than all the coal being burned for bitcoin.
But what part of "it takes a lot of coal being burned to make SSDs" isn't clear? Just because the energy use isn't directly visible doesn't mean Chia isn't also using crazy amounts of energy...
 
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T_Minus

Build. Break. Fix. Repeat
Feb 15, 2015
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This is 100% not "clean" it not only requires crazy energy usage like GPUs (look at consumption of enterprise SSD, NVME) then add consumption of capacity layer HDD and ALSO lots of CPU, this is BAD, it's going to die. There's not enough recylced parts to sustain this and miners will not spend $1k+ per-SSD to go with new. As @Layla also mentioned this affects thousands+ of businesses that rely on second hand equipment to operate too, it essentially destroys certain business models, which then destroys additional businesses that rely on those refurbished goods, and so on.. this will have MUCH greater negative affects than GPU mining and is not sustainable. When the entire 2nd hand market runs dry within a month and a half there's 0 chance this is sustainable.
 

Marsh

Moderator
May 12, 2013
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Putting climate change aside.

Just like toilet paper shortage.

There is still decent seller out there.
May 3 2021
See this listing [US-MN] Estate Sale - Part 2 - HDDs
Sorry I cut and paste from forsale post. To show price are still below pre-covid.

Price is $12.5 per tb, same price per TB for 8TB , 12TB, 14TB drive.

I promised myself not to spend (too much) money on farming. Just recycle what I already have.
I exhibit some self-control, only purchased a pair of 14tb drives
I brought the 2 x 14TB drive , drive has less about 275days usage.
Of course , all drive was sold out in few hours.

Early this month, I got 2 Samsung PM1643 3.8TB , each for $225.
Same seller listed 7.6TB for $550 each. decent deal.

Drive forsale Listing from the other forum.
16x - WD80EFAX 8TB $100 shipped each.
13x - WD80EFAX 8TB $100 shipped each.
12x - WD80EFAX 8TB $100 shipped each.
10x - WD80EFAX 8TB $100 shipped each.
5x - WD80EFAX 8TB $100 shipped each.
3x - WD80EFAX 8TB $100 shipped each.
8x - WD8OEMAZ 8TB $100 shipped each.
2x - WD80EFZX 8TB $200 for the pair shipped.
1x - WD100EMAZ 10TB and 1x - WD101KRYZ 10TB - $240 for the pair shipped.
2x - WD120EMFZ - $300 for the pair shipped.
2x - WD140EMFZ - $350 for the pair shipped.
 
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funkywizard

mmm.... bandwidth.
Jan 15, 2017
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You're off to a bad start when you're saying is it any less ethical than this other horribly unethical thing. Bitcoin is awful, too! And is it better? I'm not sure. You realize that these physical goods take energy AND materials to produce, right? And those materials take a lot of energy to mine, refine, and turn into something as complex as an SSD (and then that thing gets packaged and shipped across the world by planes, trains, ships and trucks), right?

I'm not even sure it's not worse than Bitcoin. They're all terrible. Bitcoin uses tons of energy directly. Chia will eventually use maybe as much by using tons of energy indirectly AND destroying lots of non-recycable goods in the process AND causing large shortages which will harm people in other ways downstream. Bitcoin ASICs are also likely useless outside Bitcoin, so it is also destroying some other resources that way. It's really just all horrible and everyone participating to make a buck is really horrible.
If you can't be a part of the solution, you may as well be a part of the problem?
 

TedB

Active Member
Dec 2, 2016
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One of used server distributors in EU today have said that he wishes for a crypto based on PSUs :D
 

Wasmachineman_NL

Wittgenstein the Supercomputer FTW!
Aug 7, 2019
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Hijacking this thread for a storage question: found a WD Red 4TB with ~29 pending sectors, is that fatal?
 

funkywizard

mmm.... bandwidth.
Jan 15, 2017
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I got the drive retardedly cheap with some other computer stuff, should I just toss it back where it came from?
I wouldn't trust it with my data.

1 bad sector (or pending sector) = automatic fail for us.

Backblaze stats informed this policy -- once a drive has even 1 bad sector it is dramatically more likely to fail outright.
 

msg7086

Active Member
May 2, 2017
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Doesn't matter -- you're just papering over the problem. Like rolling back an odometer.
When overwriting a sector, obsolete bitflips are refreshed to correct values. Using an analogy like rolling back odometer is non-sense. Wiping the drive is like rebuilding the car.

A pending sector is a sector that happens to have more bitflips than what ECC can correct, while a "good" sector is a sector that has less bitflips than what ECC can correct. Older drives are expected to be less healthy. A 40 year old man may have some small healthy issues, you cure it, not asking them to bury themselves in a cemetery.
 
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funkywizard

mmm.... bandwidth.
Jan 15, 2017
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When overwriting a sector, obsolete bitflips are refreshed to correct values. Using an analogy like rolling back odometer is non-sense. Wiping the drive is like rebuilding the car.

A pending sector is a sector that happens to have more bitflips than what ECC can correct, while a "good" sector is a sector that has less bitflips than what ECC can correct. Older drives are expected to be less healthy. A 40 year old man may have some small healthy issues, you cure it, not asking them to bury themselves in a cemetery.
Pending sectors are a strong indication of impeding drive failure. Just because you can get SMART to stop reporting it, doesn't mean it didn't happen. The risk of the drive failing at any time is several times higher than a drive that never reported pending sectors. Wiping the drive to get the pending sectors to go away, you're right is not like rolling back the odometer -- it's more like covering up a car crash on a salvaged vehicle and not reporting the accident.
 

msg7086

Active Member
May 2, 2017
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Guess I'm not going to argue with you on that. You are only staying on the surface talking about a drive "failure" and doesn't even care to talk about what is a "failure" and why there is a "failure". And you don't even seem to understand the difference between clearing SMART vs clearing G-list vs clearing pending sectors. I'll stop here.