Best storage drives for Chia cryptocurrency 2021

Buying Guides
By Rich Edmonds
published

Hard Drive
Hard Drive (Image credit: Windows Central)

Chia is a little different from Ethereum, Bitcoin, and other cryptocurrencies in that you don't mine it using a GPU or some form of dedicated ASCII system that requires considerable amounts of electricity. Instead, all that's required is a hard drive (or few). We've rounded up the best hard drives for storing Chia.

Seagate Exos X10 10TB

Seagate Exos X10 10TB

Best overall

The Exos series from Seagate is the company's enterprise range of hard drives. They're designed with helium inside for better performance and enhanced reliability. The enhanced caching is great for big data applications, including Chia farming. This 10TB drive comes in at less than $0.04 per gigabyte.

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Seagate Exos X18 18TB

Seagate Exos X18 18TB

Best capacity

This X18 drive has a higher data transfer rate and is almost double in capacity. It's also got the same helium-based build and has a mean time between failure of 2.5 million hours. Perfect for running a Chia farm. This massive 18TB drive may be pricey upfront, but it costs only $0.05 per gigabyte.

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Seagate BarraCuda 8TB

Seagate BarraCuda 8TB

Best value

You can get away with more affordable desktop-class drives, though these aren't really designed to run 24/7. You won't enjoy higher data transfer rates, nor will you have extended protections against wear and tear, but it's a great place to start. This is budget-friendly 8TB HDD costs only $0.03 per GB.

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Western Digital Red
Western Digital Red

Best NAS HDD

Western Digital has been making storage solutions for PCs for many years, offering reliable but somewhat slower drives for your NAS. If you'd rather farm Chia using your network storage, look no further than Western Digital's Red family of drives. These are specifically designed to run 24/7.

Sabrent Rocket PCIe 4
Sabrent Rocket 4 Plus

Best storage drive

Should you have compatible hardware, you'll be able to throw the Sabrent Rocket 4 Plus into a spare M.2 slot on your motherboard and enjoy some crazy transfer speeds. PCIe 4.0 allows this SSD to reach up to 7,100MB/s and 6,600MB/s read and write, respectively. Sabrent also packed in some neat features into this SSD, aside from the data transfer speeds. You get advanced wear-leveling, bad block management, error correction, as well as over-provision protection to enhance reliability and endurance, not to mention upgradeable firmware.

Choosing the best hard drives for Chia

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We've already gone into great detail on how to farm Chia, and choosing the right hard drive is just as straightforward. All that's required is a working HDD that can be used continuously to store as much data as it can hold. The larger the capacity, the more farm plots you can store and the more money you can expect to make.

Our top pick goes to the 10TB Seagate Exos X10. As an enterprise derive, this is about as premium as you can get. If you want to save a little, Seagate's BarraCuda 8TB costs a fair amount more than 1TB or 2TB drives, but it's reliable and will likely serve your Chia farm well for a few years. If you're going down the NAS route, we've got the best storage drives for NAS in the form of the Western Digital Red.

Rich Edmonds
Rich Edmonds
Senior Editor, PC Build

Rich Edmonds was formerly a Senior Editor of PC hardware at Windows Central, covering everything related to PC components and NAS. He's been involved in technology for more than a decade and knows a thing or two about the magic inside a PC chassis. You can follow him on Twitter at @RichEdmonds.