Phison forecasts SSD shortage until 2023 due to Chia miners

The Taiwanese company Phison Electronics warned of a forthcoming rise in SSD prices due to the hype around Chia mining. writes DigiTimes.

In the third quarter of 2021, Phison, along with other NAND flash memory and SSD controller manufacturers, intends to raise the price of its products by at least 10%. This will push up the prices of solid-state drives.

The company cites high demand from Chia miners and supply constraints.

According to Phison representatives, prices for SSD controllers will remain high in 2022 and 2023 due to capacity constraints. Companies such as TSMC, UMC, GlobalFoundries and others are expanding production capacity to address the shortage, but the process will take some time.

As of writing, the total disk space occupied by Chia exceeds 4.7 exabytes (more than 308,000 16 TB HDDs). The price of XCH is $1,051.

Chia Network, created by Bram Cohen, the author of the BitTorrent protocol, uses the Proof-of-Space and Proof-of-Time consensus algorithms.

Miners of the coin have already created a local shortage of HDDs and SSDs in China.

Galax, a local SSD maker, has decided to refuse warranty service for the SSDs on which Chia was mined. According to experts, mining cryptocurrency reduces the lifespan of a 512 GB SSD from five years to two months.

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