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Data Storage

Seagate 'Exploring' Possible New Line of Crypto-Specific Hard Drives (techradar.com) 47

Posted by msmash from the shape-of-things-to-come dept.
In a Q&A with TechRadar, storage hardware giant Seagate revealed it is keeping a close eye on the crypto space, with a view to potentially launching a new line of purpose-built drives. From the report: Asked whether companies might develop storage products specifically for cryptocurrency use cases, Jason M. Feist, who heads up Seagate's emerging products arm, said it was a "possibility." Feist said he could offer no concrete information at this stage, but did suggest the company is "exploring this opportunity and imagines others may be as well."
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Seagate 'Exploring' Possible New Line of Crypto-Specific Hard Drives More

Seagate 'Exploring' Possible New Line of Crypto-Specific Hard Drives

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  • Why stop there? (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward

    Why not jump to the chase and just find a way to vaporize resources or convert precious metals into collectable beanie babies.

    Just spitballing here. I'll let the worthless speculators decide how to pointlessly squander resources which could otherwise provide some value other than as an elaborate gambling ring?

    • Why not jump to the chase and just find a way to vaporize resources or convert precious metals into collectable beanie babies.

      I’m concerned about inflation too, but I’m converting fiat currency into traditional precious metals.

  • Whatever stops ... (Score:2, Insightful)

    by devloop ( 983641 )
    crypto retards from hoarding storage with their useless nonsense "data".
    • This is the exact opposite of that. This is Seagate wine to get a piece of the giant sales at Nvidia and AMD have seen the crypto people. If anything it's worse because the hard drives are still going to wear out it's just a nature of hard drives. This means massive amounts of hard disks going directly in the landfills. Not that we can do anything about it.

      • Re:Whatever stops ... (Score:5, Informative)

        by tlhIngan ( 30335 ) <[ten.frow] [ta] [todhsals]> on Tuesday June 01, 2021 @04:48AM (#61442070)

        This is the exact opposite of that. This is Seagate wine to get a piece of the giant sales at Nvidia and AMD have seen the crypto people. If anything it's worse because the hard drives are still going to wear out it's just a nature of hard drives. This means massive amounts of hard disks going directly in the landfills. Not that we can do anything about it.

        Never heard of Chia, then? IT's the next big thing in cryptocurrencies and instead of wasting CPU cycles, it wastes disk space.

        It's resulted in shortages of large hard drives and SSDs. 18TB+ enterprise drives are unobtainium because people are snapping them up along with 2/4/8TB SSDs.

        The buyouts are slowly making it down the list, so if you want to buy a 10TB disk, better get it quick. They haven't snapped up the consumer level drives yet, but it's only a matter of time.

    • Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • He have red, purple, green, black. Wonder what color crypto drives will be with green already taken?

  • Crypto + Hard drives implies encryption (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    If you are talking about cryptocurrency in a context or environment that regularly uses encryption is it too much to ask that you say cryptocurrency?

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Octorian ( 14086 )

      This. I think a few too many business douches who have no idea that "crypto" is short for "encryption" suddenly discovered cryptocurrency and are now flaunting it to make themselves sound knowledgeable about something in tech.

      • You know, I never thought of that when reading TFS. I imagined a disk that could use independent heads to record your absurdly valuable hashes separately on several platters rather than on disk cylinders. That way if a platter went bad you'd be covered. Shit can already be encrypted on the fly before being sent to disk. Theft of the entire disk aside, what's left but head crashes? Well, other than the absurdity of cryptocurrencies when you could have invested in NFTs or Airstream or plastics. Margins are th
      • I actually thought at first that the article is about some new encryption method directly linked to the hardware. There usually is that orange icon next to cryptocurrency article headings.

  • Relevant tweet: (Score:5, Funny)

    by Sebby ( 238625 ) on Monday May 31, 2021 @10:00PM (#61441350)

    It’s only a matter of time until someone invents a cryptocurrency that
    uses bandwidth saturation as proof of some kind of whatever and we’ll
    all be left with a few bits per day bandwidth left over and the rest gets
    soaked up on BroadBandCoin.

    @NanoRaptor [twitter.com]

    • I'm sure that's next

    • That will be interesting if it happens.

      I understand substantial parts of the US don't have decent broadband.

      Maybe your ISPs will come up with a "crypto plan" and charge you triple the amount if you plan to use it for earning crypto coins.

      • I suspect that, if something like that were to happen, the ISPs would instead take the easier option of raising prices or putting in data caps across the board. In other words, everyone else helps to pay for it.

  • ... storage products specifically for cryptocurrency use cases ...

    They'll be designed to use (at least) double the power with no real purpose or reason -- maybe with a heating element with the platters used as a cooling fan. They'll also be loud and make lots of clicking noises so people will know you have them.

  • I've never looking into chia, proof of stuff or other mining. But if speed was more important could they start making ram disks again ? They use to sell them 10+ years ago. Like 6-12 ram slots in a pci/ pcie card. Course your system powers down or crashes you disk is lost, but very fast and unlimited read/writes with out damaging. Before ssd's people used them as temp or work drives, where speed was important and that data was stored safely on a hdd and copied to the ram drive when needed.

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by Snipes420 ( 689240 )
      both fast hard drives and slower hard drives have their place in the chia farming process. Fast hard drives for 'plotting' ie, creating the cryptographic proofs on the storage. Slower ones for storage of them 'farming'. I plot on NVME and SSD then transfer them to high capacity spinning plater drives.

    • Chia mining as two steps.

      1. Generating "plots". This fills the drives with hash tables or something like that. It is rather CPU and I/O intensive, requiring 15K drives or SSDs with high endurance ratings (ro generate a ~100GB plot, the software issues about 1TB of writes to the temp storage, which usually is SSD).
      2. "Farming" those plots. Basically the software gets a "challenge" and looks over its stored plots to see if one matches. This step is read-only and generates very little I/O, but there are some l

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by tlhIngan ( 30335 )

      They use to sell them 10+ years ago. Like 6-12 ram slots in a pci/ pcie card. Course your system powers down or crashes you disk is lost, but very fast and unlimited read/writes with out damaging. Before ssd's people used them as temp or work drives, where speed was important and that data was stored safely on a hdd and copied to the ram drive when needed.

      I have a RAM drive (they call it an SSD - because it was solid state). It fit in a 5.25" drive bay and had 8 DDR2 RAM slots. It also had a battery and a h

  • Having a drive not crap out might be more critical than speed. If Seagate's hypothetical customer base isn't using racks with good cooling, then that would suggest something obvious Seagate could build on. If that kind of mining involved a lot of spin up and down of the drives that got used, then that would suggest an area that could get beefed up. P.S. Would a larger cache size help the miner? I recently bought a quality HGST (Western Digital) hard drive and the premium price nets one a larger cache size.

    • A purpose-built drive for chia would be a cheap, high-capacity SMR, 3600RPM.
      When the plotting is done, the drive is only read from and frequently (so I would set it to not spin down or park its heads), but very little at a time, maybe a few MB per minute. Read speed is not important, as long as the drive can read the required sectors in 30 seconds (which is almost doable with a tape). 3600RPM would mean lower power consumption.

  • This drive will self-destruct in five seconds. Good luck, Jim.

  • How about adding a physical "write enable" jumper (Score:4, Insightful)

    by blitz487 ( 606553 ) on Monday May 31, 2021 @11:37PM (#61441558)

    so I can read backup drives with confidence that the ransomware on my system isn't going to encrypt it.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      PROTIP for that, VeraCrypt (the continuation of TrueCrypt) has a "mount read only" option. Encrypt the entire partition, don't use a file container as malware an encrypt that.

      • Software solutions remain hackable. Physical switches cannot be hacked.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

          Well you can't have a physical switch for SATA or USB so... At best you can have something with firmware that modifies commands on the fly, but that would likely be hackable.

  • it amazes me that AMD/NVIDIA didn't embrace the people that wanted their products. I hope the storage manufacturers do and use the opportunity to put some more money into R&D and improve their space. like, shut up and take my money... what am I missing? Shouldn't all this money flowing to these GPU/Storage/etc industries help their companies to develop better technologies faster?
  • Got an email last Friday from a mate who had stumbled over this... and who sent me a link to this suspect article [tomshardware.com] over at Tom's Hardware.

    Here are some of the "tells" I spotted in the Tom's Hardware article that tell me that it's a scam... see if you can spot more:-

    1. Dubious Article Publication Date
    If you look at the top of the article, you'll see that Tom's claim, "First Published 1 week ago". Then, between the 3rd and 4th paragraphs, you'll see an added comment from the editorial team that reads

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      Linus Tech Tips tested out a similar coin that uses storage as the stake. It did not go well.

      https://youtu.be/nJ4ea5NNqcg [youtu.be]

      Even with thousands of USD of storage the earnings were a fraction of cost of the electricity needed to keep it online, let alone the price of the actual storage.

    • You are very mistaken. First, you are confusing plots with blocks. You can take your plots offline (or delete them) any time you want - youâ(TM)ll just miss out potential coin rewards for potential farmed blocks. Your existing coins are not affected and remain in your wallet. You can do transactions just like with every other crypto - enter an address and press send. Done, all that is transmitted for the transaction is a couple hundred bytes. You do not need any plots for this.

  • ....show us the real stuff.
    Like true multi-head (per surface), multi-actuator drive.
    Those will offer great redundancy and with all heads being capable of simultaneous r/W on their track on the same cylinder, pretty spectacular transfer speeds.

  • Why does cryptography need its on hard drive? I mean, you can't be referring to cryptocurrencies because only someone technologically literate would refer to those as crypto.

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