I stumbled upon an interview with the actual Chia <s>miner</s> farmer, he claims best SSDs will stay healthy for about a year, and having SSD is a must. Plotting should be done on an SSD (preferably as an NVMe), since this process involves creating 300Gb temp file on the same device that will be used to form a plot. Actual interview [0] is in Russian, but I guess you could get a decent Google Translate-processed English translation . [0] https://habr.com/ru/company/ruvds/blog/554046/