Crucial restricted Chia mining on its SSDs, but later backtracked

Crucial, the SSD maker, threatened to void warranties on devices used for mining the Chia cryptocurrency, but later retracted the claim. As reported by Tom’s Hardware.

Last week the company amended its warranty policy, adding a provision stating that “the use of Crucial solid-state drives for crypto mining will void the warranty.” The restrictions even affected the Crucial P5 model with high write endurance and could potentially apply to SSDs already in use.

“The warranty covers only defects that arise under normal use and does not include failures or breakdowns resulting from improper use, negligence, abuse, including mining and other activities,” Crucial said in its original statement, which is now available in the archive.

Later, the mining clause disappeared from the company’s site.

Crucial representatives said there was confusion.

“Our current warranties on solid-state drives have not changed and consist of two parts: calendar time (3 or 5 years) and/or total bytes written (up to 1200 TB depending on capacity), whichever comes first. These standard warranty terms apply to all Crucial SSDs,” they noted.

The publication suggested the original clause might have represented incomplete changes to the warranty. However the company’s representatives disputed this as well:

“This is an attempt to educate our customers who plan to use consumer SSDs for crypto mining. The issue is not the nature of the application in question, but the large volume of data written. The aim was to inform consumers about any problems that may arise with applications requiring intensive writes. Any confusion caused by the blog post was entirely accidental,” Crucial added.

Experts estimate that mining Chia reduces the lifespan of a 512GB SSD from five years to two months. However the creator of the coin, Bram Cohen, argued that this does not apply to enterprise drives or hard disks.

The Chinese company Galax refused warranty service on SSDs used for mining Chia.

PNY reduced the endurance of the XLR8 CS3030 series SSDs. The endurance of some models decreased by almost 80%.

Subscribe to ForkLog news on Telegram: ForkLog Feed — the full news feed, ForkLog — the most important news, infographics and opinions.