Hard drive out of stock? Welcome to the era of great speculation.

"Thanks to "Cyberpunk 2077". Although this game has a lot of bugs, I bought an RTX 3080 a year ago because of it. Now the price has doubled. Thanks to 2077, I learned how to manage money." A Steam player The comments under the game "Cyberpunk 2077" were copied and pasted by countless people and spread to various social platforms. Players smiled knowingly. They knew that this was a satire on the crazy and skyrocketing graphics card prices for half a year. Due to insufficient production capacity and extremely strong demand, the price of graphics cards that continue to be out of stock remains high in the secondary market, which has evolved from a technology industry event to a social event. Now, it's the hard disk's turn to be out of stock, and even the hard disks we use to store pictures and movies are starting to get fired. The hard disk price in the mouth of the hard disk seller is like a stock. The price of the hard disk is changed many times a day, and the price of the hard disk is different every hour. Each quotation is even valid for only one hour. Users on Weibo and Immediately took screenshots and lamented that they can no longer afford hard drives. Those merchants who sold graphics cards before began to sell hard drives part-time. Some people say that the root of all these phenomena comes from a newly launched cryptocurrency project called "Chia". There is only one reason, Chia needs to use hard disk mining. This statement has also been confirmed at some levels. On Douyin, a video introducing Chia’s hard drive mining has easily won 100,000 likes; on the Baidu Index, Chia’s keyword search-zce volume has increased since April. The breakthrough has risen sharply; people in the circle of friends who used to pull heads to do community began to say that they want to form a group to mine Chia; even Hikvision, an A-share listed company with a market value of 500 billion, also issued a statement that its surveillance hard drives are not suitable for mining. The thoughts of practitioners in the encryption industry, "The whole world is on the P drive." US computer hardware manufacturer PNY launches solid-state drive designed for Chia: US computer hardware manufacturer PNY has launched the first solid-state drives (SSD) designed specifically for Chia mining. The PNY LX2030 and LX3030 M.2 NVMe SSDs are "ultra-high-endurance" models that offer an endurance rating of up to 54,000 terabytes written (TBW). (decrypt) [2021/7/23 1:10:22] However, Rhythm BlockBeats sorted out the hype path of hard drives and found that it is not a simple unequal relationship between supply and demand that leads to price increases. Behind the price increase of hard drives is the epitome of the sentiment in the secondary market and the projection of anxiety in this era of great speculation. Of course, hard disk mining does tell a good story. It can become popular for a reason. Friends who know Bitcoin have more or less heard of the idea that Bitcoin consumes energy. Bitcoin converts power consumption into computing power, and mining Bitcoin consumes a lot of power. According to statistics from the University of Cambridge, the electricity consumption of Bitcoin has recently reached a record high, reaching 12.9 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity, accounting for 0.59% of global electricity consumption. You may not have any idea about this number. With 12.9 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity, it ranks 34th among countries in the world in terms of electricity consumption, surpassing the annual electricity consumption of countries such as Ukraine and Argentina. As a result, we have seen various attacks on Bitcoin for wasting resources, the most representative being Bill Gates. Chia cuts at this point, mining Chia does not waste resources, but uses hard disk space. This is a project created in 2017. The founder is Bram Cohen. Almost no one knows this name, but users who have used BitTorrent and Thunder Download must know about BitTorrent, which once occupied 60% of the global Internet traffic. protocol, and Bram is the founder of BitTorrent. Chia mining 1TB hard drive only earns 1 yuan a day: on the one hand, the price of Chia coins has plummeted, on the other hand, too many people have poured into Chia mining in the past few months, and the capacity of the entire mine has reached 24EiB, plus Recently, the algorithm has been adjusted, and the difficulty of the P disk has also increased. According to the latest situation, it takes almost 2,700 days to mine 1 Chia coin from a 1TB hard drive, which is 7 and a half years. For rich miners, the mining capacity starts from PB, 1PB is 1000TB, and it takes almost 3 days to mine one. However, if calculated in this way, the period for mining to pay back is too far away. The daily income of a 1TB hard drive is about 0.15 US dollars, and the monthly income is 4.5 US dollars. Calculated to earn 1 yuan a day. (Tencent News) [2021/6/27 0:08:50] At this point, the elements of a good story are basically complete. Holding a top institution, the founder is well-known around the world, the concept directly hits the weakness of Bitcoin, and the concept of "green Bitcoin", combined with the super bull market of cryptocurrency, with the expectation of "mining Chia is mining early Bitcoin", the story of Chia landed. Everyone bet on one thing, the Chia tokens they dug up can skyrocket. Rhythm BlockBeats witnessed the off-market price of Chia token XCH rising from $40 to $100, and asked Jiao Nan, an active-zce investor who participated in the off-market purchase of XCH, in the community, and found that XCH cannot be traded at present, and can only be traded on-site Circulation through mining pools. On different social platforms, and even in different groups, the price of XCH is not the same. "I use the mining pool as a third-party intermediary, and I have made a lot of profits by buying low and selling high in various groups." The price is too high and I dare not buy, what should I do? Then dig directly, mining Bitcoin costs electricity, while mining Chia consumes hard disks, and hard disks become resources and also consumables. Before starting the hard disk mining, it is necessary to carry out the P disk. The P disk is Plot, and this behavior is also called drawing or seeding. In the P disk stage, encrypted data will be written in the hard disk. During this process, a large amount of data will be generated. We found Chia's official advice. They said to use a solid-state drive (SSD) with a fast writing speed as the cache disk, and a mechanical hard disk (HDD) as the final file storage disk. According to the actual test of Rhythm BlockBeats, it is necessary to write about 2TB of data in the cache disk to complete a minimum file (about 101 GB). The data volume of 2TB is converted into about 300 high-definition movies (1080P) that are usually watched. The price of Seagate's 16TB hard drive has fallen back to more than 2,000 RMB: According to information from the computing power forum, the price of Seagate's 16TB hard drive has dropped to more than 2,000 RMB. It is reported that during the popular period of mining, Western Digital Red Disk 12TB once rose to tens of thousands of RMB on Taobao. [2021/6/22 23:56:18] However, writing a large amount of data will greatly shorten the life of the hard disk. Chia mining is not a real reuse of idle hard disks. Let’s take a 1TB Samsung 970 EVO as an example, and its theoretical lifespan can only produce 30TB final files. Looking at the current Chia computing power, it is found that the computing power of the entire network is 413 PB. If 413 PB is converted according to the 1TB Samsung 970 EVO hard drive, about 42,300 hard drives have been exhausted. In addition to consuming the hard disk, the P disk also takes a lot of time. According to the actual measurement, it takes at least 7 hours to complete the 101 GB file. Rhythm BlockBeats conducted a Chia mining test on March 26. At that time, a 101.4 GB plot file required 10 months to dig out a block. Today on April 19th, the 101.4 GB plot file takes up to 3 years to mine a block. For miners, buying hard disks early and P disks early, and P disks and blocks coming out early, time is money. This is also one of the reasons why a large number of miners buy a large number of hard disks in a short period of time regardless of the cost price. The wealth effect appeared, and market sentiment accelerated. As a result, the hard disk did rise. Hard drives with a capacity above 4TB are all out of stock, and the spot price has also increased by more than 50% from the lowest level last week. Chia founder: \"Chia burned the hard drive\" is not true: Chia founder Bram Cohen tweeted that for some strange reason, "Chia burned the hard drive!" was repeated by the fashion trend. Which is weird, because in most cases, it's just plain wrong. [2021/5/17 22:09:07] Western Digital Red Disk 12TB Price Trend Western Digital Red Disk 12TB is currently priced at 3499 yuan on JD.com, but it is out of stock. On Taobao, the spot price has risen to 11,659 yuan. Western Digital Red Disk 12TB spot price high-capacity hard disk and high-performance hard disk are not aimed at ordinary users. Why are all social media discussing hard disk price increases? Chia has a good story, but it is not a leader. In the field of hard disk mining, the recognized leader is a project called Filecoin. Top-level capital endorsement, well-known concept, king-level project, the 17th largest cryptocurrency project in the world, hard disk mining is absolutely faucet. Filecoin hard disk mining machines have been on sale since 2018. According to incomplete estimates, there are 200-300 manufacturers in Huaqiangbei selling Filecoin mining machines. Because Filecoin is so popular, real and fake mining machines are all over the market. There have been media reports that a manufacturer called "Snail Mining Machine" sold nearly 300,000 fake Filecoin mining machines within 5 months, with sales of nearly 2 billion yuan. Rhythm BlockBeats has also learned about the market size of Filecoin mining machines. In 2020, the sales of Filecoin mining machines will be about 20 billion yuan. Hong Shuning: Hard disk mining is far more harmful than computing power mining: Hong Shuning, director of Jinqiu Blockchain Research Institute, said on Weibo today that purely from the perspective of environmental protection, hard disk mining is far more harmful than computing power mining. power mining. ​​[2021/5/16 22:07:46] From the browser, the real storage space of Filecoin's entire network is 4.41 EB. This storage space is more than 10 times the effective storage space of Chia's entire network. Even without counting this number, the capacity of Filecoin's millions of fake mining machines has far exceeded the real storage space of Chia's entire network. The problem is that the popularity of Filecoin has not caused large-scale stock outs, price increases, and hype in the hard disk industry. Why can a Chia change the hard drive industry? That is, the mining principles of the two are different, but the essence is to use hard disks. Fake mining machines also need hard disks, and the leader does not have the influence. Why does a Chia have such a large amount of energy? In other words, who is driving hard drive prices? When searching for information on Rhythm BlockBeats, I found a block chain summit agenda map. In the picture, Seagate senior engineers were listed. This is not a coincidence. At the beginning of 2020, Seagate China's channel senior director, senior manager, senior storage solution expert, and South China key account manager visited Interstellar and expressed that they would cooperate on products and technologies. Starland is a company established in 2018 whose main business is Filecoin (IPFS) mining. In the field of hard disk mining, Interstellar is equivalent to Bitmain in the field of Bitcoin mining. Is the hard disk out of stock and price increase a conspiracy of the manufacturer? Just like Nvidia, it wants to harvest game players, but also doesn't want to give up the mining market. After launching the RTX 3060, after finding that the premium in the graphics card market is not much, they "accidentally" leaked the graphics card driver that can mine at full speed. His mouth is full of considerations for players, but his heart is full of business with miners. However, the hard disk is not a graphics card, the technical content-zce is not high, and the shipment volume is larger. Some consumer products can already be replaced by domestic products. According to Trendfocus statistics, the total shipment volume of SSDs in 2020 will be 330 million units, with a total storage capacity of 27 EB. The total shipment of mechanical hard disks was 259 million pieces, of which Seagate shipped 110 million pieces, with a total storage capacity of 1018 EB, which is 2524 times the total computing power of the current Chia network. There is no single player in the hard disk market, and Seagate is only one of the manufacturers with a large shipment volume. The price of Amazon in the United States, which can provide direct mail to China, is still within a reasonable range, and has become the first choice for some players and miners. If it wasn't for the starvation marketing of manufacturers holding hard disks and reluctantly selling them, where would all the hard disks go? Rhythm bought two Seagate Barracuda 4TB hard drives at the end of March for testing Chia mining, and the unit price was 559 yuan. However, the price of this hard drive on different social media is more than 1,000 yuan. Source: Weibo and instant users At the same time, Rhythm asked about the "ASUS ASUS Flagship Store" with a price tag of 1199 yuan, and the reply was "market reasons". The hard disk price increase may have nothing to do with Chia, nor has it to do with hard disk manufacturers. Ordinary consumers do not understand mining, nor do they understand the hard disk market. Driven by KOL and social media sentiment, they generally believe that hard disks will soon be out of stock and prices will skyrocket. Some merchants took advantage of this to raise prices and take advantage of the trend to cut leeks. Without knowing the truth, the whole people began to hoard hard drives. What the hard disk mining market lacks is larger capacity, such as mechanical hard drives above 8T and high TBW solid-state drives, rather than ordinary consumer-grade products. Most of the products used by ordinary consumers are not suitable for hard disk mining. The final result is that KOL gets more traffic, consumers spend more money to buy products, manufacturers sell more products, and the tokens mined by miners get more attention. Except for the average consumer, all seem to win in the end. Perhaps as Jiao Nan said, the price of Chia tokens is like a blind box. Only when it is opened can the sentiment of being provoked in the hard disk market be stopped. It has become an ideal state to buy electronic products early and enjoy early, and buy later to enjoy discounts. The voice of buying early and getting rich has overshadowed the voice of reason. Just like the gamers who speculate on hard disks said, if you miss the skyrocketing price of memory sticks and graphics cards, do you still want to miss the skyrocketing price of hard disks? It is the Chinese themselves who prevent the Chinese from buying hard drives. Gamers have finally become the scalpers they hate the most. Remember that hard drive we bought earlier and posted thousands of dollars on social media? At the time of writing, "Seagate Seagate JD Self-operated Flagship Store" can still be bought at a price of 609 yuan, and some cities can also enjoy the next-day delivery service. The new crown pneumonia at the end of 2019 is a turning point, which is the first global crisis faced by human beings after satisfying food and clothing.

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