If you happen to stumble upon an SSD or HDD listed well below its price point on an online market place, then it's wise to double-check as Chia miners are offloading their hardware (mainly HDD and SSDs) at a loss as the coin continues to plummet in terms of its value.
Chia Coin's Plummeting Value Prompts Miners To Sell Used HDD and SSDs As Brand New On Online Marketplaces
As reported by VNExpress International, Crypto miners who had invested in Chia Coin have started to sell their hardware at losses and switch over to other crypto opportunities as the value of XCH or Chia Coin continues to fall.
The Chia Coin cryptocurrency aimed to be a very lucrative & eco-friendly mining venture when it was first introduced, requiring less power to mine compared to traditional GPU/ASIC miners and putting less effect on the global environment. Chia Coin peaked out at an impressive $1614 US value back in May but ever since then, the price has continued to fall down and currently sits at $282.19 US (at the time of writing this article).
This has led Chia Coin miners to lose their trust within the Cryptocurrency and move to other options but as stated above, other Crypto options don't make use of HDDs and SSDs so the only option left for these miners is to sell them off in the used marketplaces. However, instead of just doing that, Chia miners have started putting up ads on online marketplaces, selling their SSDs & HDDs as brand new when that is not the case.
An Admin of a Chia Coin Facebook Group with over 5000 Chia traders has seen an influx of ads where miners are selling their used hardware as new. One of the miners had expressed the following views:
"I am selling my hardware I bought three months ago for a loss," said Quang Thuan, a Chia miner in the southern province of Dong Nai. Thuan joined the market in May when Chia prices were shooting up.
You might remember that the Chia Coin boom also led to high-capacity HDDs and SSDs becoming scarce in APAC markets. This means that all those who bought hardware for Chia Coin did so at an inflated price rate and now they are selling them at a loss. So the only way to circumvent around it is to make fake ads. Chia Coin mining puts lots of stress on HDDs and SSDs and not only voids the warranty but can also damage the drive to the point where it is not feasible to use or will include several damaged sectors which would result in permanent data loss if it somehow ends up being workable.
Just for comparison, a standard 1 TB HDD would last 10 years with normal usage but with Chia Coin mining, it would last only 80 days. And considering that the majority of these drives were bought in May during the boom period, they are well past the 80-day duration. So you are most likely to get a paper-weight for paying the price of a brand new HDD/SSD which was sold to you as a new one. It's wise to refrain from looking for cheaper HDD and SSD hardware in online marketplaces right now & if you plan to do so, then make sure you do your research & don't end up with a broken storage device.
