Russia’s hard-drive sales double amid the Chia craze.

In late April, analysts recorded a sharp spike in demand for HDDs and SSDs in Russian online stores. RBK reports citing Yandex’s press service.

According to experts, from April 21 sales of internal hard drives have risen by 2.5 times, external HDDs and SSDs by 1.6 times, and internal SSDs by 1.4 times, compared with the start of the month.

Yandex noted that, in monetary terms, sales in the “internal hard drives” category rose more than fourfold.

The company linked this spike to interest in the cryptocurrency Chia:

“Users are not only buying new hard drives and storage devices, but are also opting for more expensive options with larger storage capacity.”

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

Against the hype around the coin, miners created local shortage of HDDs and SSDs in China. According to a blogger, assembling a farm of 200 TB would require about $16 000.

For mining Chia, Team Group released SSD with a write endurance of 12 petabytes.

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