Thread by @bramcohen

For some odd reason the 'Chia burns out hard drives!' is getting repeated as the fashionable fud. This is odd, because for the most part it's just plain wrong (thread)

If you plot with a plain old HD or an enterprise-class SSD then your drive will survive no problem. Plotting on hard drives, including the one which you'll probably leave your plot on, works fine. It's a bit slower and requires more head room, but works fine.

We've gone to great pains and put a lot of technical wizardry into getting plotting even on HDs to work completely acceptably. The amount of head room it needs isn't much more than one plot, and the time it takes isn't much more than double.

At the moment there's a huge premium on plotting quickly because (a) everything is new and (b) the netspace is growing, uh, a bit quickly

In this environment there's a huge premium on getting plotting done fast because the work difficulty is going up so quickly that the same amount of space now is worth a lot more than it will be in the future. Once work difficulty gets high enough this will settle down.

What point the S-curve will stabilize at can't be predicted with curve fitting during the growth phase. My guess based on running numbers is somewhere around 100 Exbibytes

Also plotting is much more prominent now because a plot is made once and stays around forever. You're going to see a lot of people with big plotting rigs with not much need for plotting in the future.

This has already happened to some extent with plotting as a service being available. Also some people planned ahead and got themselves a new gaming machine which first paid for itself by plotting

But back to the original point: Don't plot with consumer SSD! Or at least, only do a little bit of plotting with each consumer SSD

Also don't clean nonstick pans with steel wool, don't clean vegetables with soap, and don't use your phone as a doorstop. These aren't arguments against steel wool, soap, or phones, they're basic guidelines about using your tools properly.