Drives used for Chia farming both SSD and HDD would have very little use over time. All the discussion around Chia destroying SSD's is when they are used in the initial plotting process which does a huge amount of reads and writes in the process of generating a plot. Once you move those plots to a large capacity spinning disk for farming, there is very little reads on the disk thereafter.
Proof-of-space is essentially stored Proof-of-work. You are pre-filling your drive with many cryptographic hash's. When a challenge comes in the software will do a quick check to see if any of your plots could possibly have a proof (a hash with sufficient zeros for that challenge). If any of your plots pass this filter then the plot is looked up on the HDD to check if it does indeed contain a proof. The difficulty, the number of zeros needed for a hash to be considered a proof, adjusts as the network grows to ensure a steady supply of coins. With proof-of-work you are printing lottery tickets every time a challenge comes in, then throwing them away and starting again, with Proof-of-space you are printing your tickets once and then storing them for years. There is extra layers, Chia is actually proof-of-space-and-time, so that you can't win by faking proof-of-space with proof-of-work.
Yes, you can. That's called a grinding attack. There is mitigation in the proof-of-space construction for exactly that. That is also the reason that they will have to move to more expensive proofs as time goes on, and hardware improves.
Yes you absolutely want to be farming with spinning drives for the better price to capacity ratio as you mention! (Hopefully in a few years this will change and SSDs will overtake spinning disks in this metric)
The most efficient way to start your farm is to build your plot with a temporary drive (an SSD) and then move it to a destination drive (Spinning HDD) where the actual farming takes place.
The building of the plot is what does heaps of writes and reads and puts the wear on an SSD.
You absolutely can plot directly to Spinning Disk however it is slow and you will really be trashing the heads if you try and plot multiples to the same disk.
The solution is an enterprise SSD with proper endurance. If a consumer SSD doesn't state it's TBW then you can be pretty sure its not very much.
> wouldn't it be more interesting for people to have spinning drives (for the better ratio of GB / $)?
You do trade off for a slower read rate. If the rate of requests coming in is fast enough, your spinning drive/s may not be fast enough to go through the indexes for each one.
I'm probably missing something here. CPU/GPU cycles are irreversible, you can't get them back after you have used them. Storage space is reversible, you can get it back at any time by deleting what has been stored. I'm sure they have a way of detecting and preventing this, but wouldn't that imply that constant network connectivity is required to check that the storage is still allocated?
Think of proof of work, where you create loads of hashes for each challenge that comes in, once people came along with ASICs they could create so many more hashes in the same amount of time! The chances of finding a proof with an ASIC is directly correlated with how much more hashes you can create than a CPU in a given time. With proof-of-space you are storing the hashes on disk. The more hashes you have stored the more chance you have of finding a proof. You can delete those hashes at any time if you would like (to use the space for some other purpose) and the only effect is that you will just be lowering your chances of finding a proof for any future challenges. You don't have to be connected to the network all the time, however you will only have a chance of winning Chia while you are connected to the network.
The positives of this approach:
1) Once you have plotted you drive and the plots are farming you use very little electricity (many people farm with Rasberry Pi's)
2) You can utilize unused storage on drives you already own and then as you need that space for some other purpose you can delete the plots.
3) Your chances of wining are directly correlated with your share of the network space ie. someone who plots twice as much has you has on average twice the chance of wining a block, no more, no less.
4) Building a special ASIC for proof of work serves no useful benefit beyond what it was intended to do. Whereas if someone was to build a cheaper more efficient form of storage, well that would be a benefit to everyone!
Plotting is the initial process of building the files that you farm with. Plotting is very CPU/Memory/Disk IO intensive and the total writes to a disk to build a ~100gb plot is over 1tb with ~260gb of temporary space used at any one time during the process. This means that the process of building plots (plotting) is best done with an ssd. The fact that the process writes over 1tb to the disk to generate a ~100gb plot means that you will be really consuming the life of a consumer grade SSD with a low TBW rating. It is possible to use RAMDisk and yes it is potentially faster for a single plot. But you would need ~260gb of ram to plot 1 plot at a time. Nvme SSD's are only marginally slower than ramdisk but they are much cheaper per GB and you can connect multiples of them meaning you can build many plots at once. ie. 1-2 plots per CPU core concurrently provided you have sufficient ram ~3400mb per plot and sufficient fast temporary storage SSD. Once plotted the plot file can be moved to a spinning disk HDD and farmed from there as very little reads are ever made in the farming process. Can you use Ramdisk? yes. Is it better? No. It's far cheaper and faster to use SSDs and use your ram for building multiple concurrent plots.
