Prices of some HDD models in the United States rise by $200 amid Chia demand

Due to elevated demand for hard drives from Chia miners, prices for high-capacity HDDs at U.S. retailers have risen by several hundred dollars. Tom’s Hardware reports.

Compared with early 2021, by May the price of the Toshiba X300 12TB HDD rose from $320 to $500.

Data: Tom’s Hardware.

BarraCuda Pro 14TB rose from $480 to $649. The WD Gold 14TB, designed for enterprises, now costs $630 instead of $410.

Data: Tom’s Hardware.

Disks for NAS and data-centres are considered the most cost-effective for Chia mining. 8TB drives rose by only $40–$70, while higher-capacity models rose much more.

Data: Tom’s Hardware.

Since mid-April 2021, data-centre hard drives with 16TB capacities or more have become $250–$400 more expensive, depending on the model, and some have disappeared from sale.

Before the Chia craze, their prices had been falling for many months. For example, the Seagate Exos X16 16TB, from June 2020 to April 2021, fell from $700 to $320, but then the price instantly jumped to $630.

Hard drives for home PCs with 6–8 TB capacity and Shingled Magnetic Recording (SMR) technology hardly rose in price. The Seagate BarraCuda 6TB model kept its pre-Chia price, while the WD Blue 6TB rose by $15.

The price of the Seagate BarraCuda 8TB rose in the spring from $140 to $190.

Data: Tom’s Hardware.

High-capacity drives with larger-capacity recording in overlap (CMR) have risen more sharply. BarraCuda Pro 10TB rose from $350 to $400, and the Toshiba X300 10TB from $260 to $295.

As of writing, the total disk space occupied by the Chia cryptocurrency exceeds 7.8 exabytes. The price of XCH is $1,130.

The Chia network creator Bram Cohen’s protocol uses the Proof-of-Space and Proof-of-Time consensus algorithms (the proofs of space and time).

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

Earlier, Phison Electronics warned of upcoming price increases for SSDs due to the hype around Chia mining.

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