PSA: Mining Chia on an SSD Will Absolutely Wreck It in No Time Flat

When SSDs first began shipping in consumer products, there were understandable concerns about their longevity. Time, steadily improving manufacturing techniques, and some low-level OS improvements have all contributed to solid-state storage’s reputation for durability. With reports praising SSDs as provisionally more reliable than hard drives even under heavy usage, it’s easy to see how people might not see the new Chia cryptocurrency as a major cause for concern.

It is. Chia is first plotted and then farmed, and while farming Chia takes very little in the way of processing resources, plotting it will absolutely hammer an SSD.

It’s been years since we talked about write amplification, but it’s an issue that affects all NAND flash storage. NAND is written in 4KB pages and erased in 256KB blocks. If 8KB of data needs to be replaced out of a 256KB block, the drive will need to read the original 256KB block, update it, write the new block to a different location on the drive, and then erase the previous block.

Write amplification has been a problem for NAND since the beginning and a great deal of work has gone into addressing these problems, but Chia represents something of a worst-case scenario. Here’s an excerpt from a recent Chia blog post:

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