> Chia plotting is extremely I/O intensive and destroys most SSDs in under a few weeks
Woah, really?
Woah, really?
These above mentioned consumer drives, when written to in massive amounts (I believe even the lower sized Chia plots thrash the SSD to the tune of at least a couple terabytes of write usage) cause it to degrade at a significantly higher rate.
Long story short, consumer SSDs aren't designed for super high write tasks, while enterprise and higher-end ones are.
This is still only a couple hundred 100GB plots (the smallest possible size).
"Chia SSDs" being made are something like 12000TBW.
The standard plot size uses 1.2TB of writes.
You won't wear out your SSD in a few weeks with Chia...you just won't. If you use a 120GB one, maybe...but no-one is doing this.
You could theoretically plot on a RAMdisk to avoid this problem, but the necessary amount of RAM would be incredibly expensive, so it's unlikely that many people will do it.
No one is claiming that Chia is burning hard drives. He is intentionally being misleading. Chia absolutely destroys consumer SSDs.
If they are used to produce many orders of magnitude more plots than could fit on them. His point is you don't need SSDs to plot, and can reasonably make them directly on the spinning HDD on which you'll store them. I know, because I'm doing this. I make one plot in about 10 hours on the 7200rpm commodity drive in my home media server. It may take me longer to fill up my space than it would with an SSD, but compared to the amount of time in the future I'll be able to farm the plots it doesn't really matter. Cranking out plots as fast as possible probably only helped for the first week or two.
People are burning out SSDs since they're buying into the arms race and trying to get/stay ahead of the netspace growth, hoping for some "easy" XCH, but that's a choice they're making, using poor (or more likely no) ROI calculations and outdated information.