Panic buying disks?

I don’t think anyone expected such a big hype around chia – well probably the founders did but not in a short time-frame but that’s a different story . For an average Joe it’s getting harder and harder to remain competitive and see an acceptable? time to win estimate. This aside as it’s a story on it’s own, people probably realized that disks prices started to increase, some shops even cancelled orders which is a very interesting effect of chia – but is it really chia? To tell the truth it’s more complex than that:

• Shortages of silicon chips that impacts almost every industries.
• Filecoin (FIL) price surges past 190$ lately and reached it’s all time high.
• Pandemic – most of the people still at home and for some the only entertainment is sitting in front of a computer to play, watch videos or just do all sorts of things that in one way or another generates data.
• Many companies learnt the impact of the pandemic to their business in the hard way. Most of them has accelerated moving to the cloud that also means more data, so cloud providers – one of the biggest consumers of disks are also buying more – well I know what they buy is slightly different what gets to the retailers but still relevant.
• Disk manufacturers sell their drives to basically three markets: consumer, OME, large giant companies like cloud providers. If we can talk about a “chia effect” then it will only impact the consumer space as with OEM and cloud providers they have very specific longer term contract in place so their supply should not be impacted.

Shall I go and buy as much disks as possible?

I would say no, buy what you can afford or want and most importantly you can fully utilize. The disk market is an order of magnitude larger than the GPU market with more manufacturers (I think it’s probably 19x bigger) so I am fairly confident the supply problems, price increase is temporary.