Chia crypto mining: 10 exabytes of data, or 10 million terabytes

Chia cryptocurrency blew into the scene weeks ago, melting storage and eating up SSD supplies worldwide -- but just how much storage has Chia eaten through in the last few months? 10 exabytes.

2

1 exabyte is 1 million terabytes. That means 10 million terabytes or 10,000,000 TB of storage has been eaten up by Chia cryptocurrency mining so far. These numbers have skyrocketed recently, as Chia had only chomped into around 6 exabytes of storage, but it has close to doubled that inside of a week.

Another huge fact here is that most of this is being done on ultra-fast NVMe SSD drives, thanks to their superior flash-based storage compared to mechanical HDDs. If you want to write 100 terabytes of plots (1010 plots) then you're going to eat into 1.6 petabytes of NVMe writes which is insane.

Plotting is the first stage of Chia crypto mining, which is explained as writing the lottery tickets (in Chia terms this is called plots) and then farming (once you've plotted your Chia, you would HODL it and hope that one of your plots strikes a win). You will need CPU power, RAM, and a super-fast temporary storage drive for this.

A commonly-size Chia plot is K32 or 101GB, in order to write a single K32 plot you'll need at least 2 CPU threads, around 3.4GB of RAM, and around 1.6TB of writes. This last part is important: that 1.6TB of writes required burns 1.6TB of writes off your SSD... a decent SSD will have 600TBW (total terabytes written) endurance.

A higher-end Sabrent Rocket 4 Plus 4TB PCIe 4.0 NVMe SSD has 2800 TBW, so you will be much better with a higher-end drive. However, you're definitely going to be eating through some ultra-fast, and super-expensive, and soon incredibly hard to get NVMe SSDs for the ultimate in Chia cryptocurrency mining.