Hard drive fever in the US stems from a new digital currency

A new digital currency is being blamed for shortages of hard drives and other storage devices.

The new digital currency Chia consumes a lot of hard drives. Photo: Guardian The Guardian (UK) reported that American businessman Bram Cohen created a digital currency called Chia. Accordingly, Chia aims to be more advanced than Bitcoin and Ethereum in reducing the energy consumed to mine. Cryptocurrency mining often depends on high power consuming computers to handle complex algorithms. However, Chia requires the user to spend a large amount of control to form and store any number of numbers. Given the fact that the price of cryptocurrencies has skyrocketed in recent times, the demand for hard drives specifically for Chia mining has also skyrocketed. A type of semiconductor drive (SSD) called NVMe, which is used to generate random numbers, is also highly sought after. Over the past week, the prices of hard drives and NVMe have been on an uphill trend. One point worth noting is that SSDs are inherently limited in number. Digital currency expert David Gerard told the Guardian: “Instead of consuming power, Chia gobbles up SSDs at a special rate.” According to CoinMarketCap on May 26, in the last 24 hours, there was 50 million USD worth of Chia traded, quite modest compared to 50 billion USD of Bitcoin. However, Chia’s potential keeps the demand for hard drives still on the rise. In the past, graphics cards, which have been an important element of video games and artificial intelligence research, have also fallen into sharp shortages due to demand from Ethereum miners. In another development, on May 26, Iran issued a ban on Bitcoin mining to prevent power shortages.