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If Terabytes are your thing, then i’ve got great news for you. In a time where the world is getter smaller, at least you can count on Seagate making your storage capacity larger.
While this is fantastic for serious videographers and gamers, it’s even more fantastic for farmers (of Chia coins). Anyone who is participating in farming Chia coins understands that one of the attractions of proof-of-space-and-time farming is the serious energy savings. As Chia uses hard drives to farm over ASIC/GPU’s to mine, we know that there is an average of 5–10 watts of consumption per drive. Regardless of the drive density this is the average power consumption. That means we can opt to use one 18TB drive at this power level (using only one 3.5" slot of real estate) vs nine 2TB drives at 45–90 watts power consumption and a whole lot of valuable space.
With respect to capacity, Seagate is looking like it will have a short-term strategic advantage over its competitors as they have been working diligently on Heat Assisted Magnetic Recording (HAMR) technology which will allow continued density over the maturing Conventional Magnetic Recording (CMR) tech. Looking at Seagate’s roadmap below, HAMR almost brings 1TB additional capacity per month over the next 5 years.
Western Digital is currently choosing a slightly different strategy. Their roadmap indicates a larger focus on Microwave Assisted Magnetic Recording (MAMR) before moving into HAMR technology. We will have to see who maintains the technology lead, but either way, it will be a great boon to the consumer.
This is great news for any Chia coin farmer. As an example, my current configuration allows for 91 drives. This means I am constrained to just under 1.6 Petabytes of farmable plots using 18TB drives. Rather than build additional server racks, I can continue to farm using existing equipment and only replace drives on failure with a plan to upgrade the fleet in 2026 with 50+ size TB drives for a total capacity near 4.4 Petabytes. If you are a Chia farmer ????? of any capacity, whether farming on 1 drive or hundreds, this is great news. Let’s see what kind of monthly cash flow delta that would generate using the Chia coin value at the time of this writing: $213.
No matter how you slice it, whether at 1.6 Pbytes or 4.4 Pbytes, it’s a nice source of secondary income. The real beauty of all of this is that it can all be run off of a single 15 amp household circuit!
If you have not yet looked into the fun of farming Chia, now is the time as it is still early in development. The best way to start is by using a portion of your existing unused storage capacity to get the hang of it. After that, it’s hats off and what your budget will allow.
Needless to say, this is certainly not investment advice; only educational and to highlight that we have some exciting growth in the HD storage sector.
