HDDs used for chia mining or similar shitcoins have been used for just a full wipe to create the huge rainbow table or whatever the shitcoin needed and then left on idle with very little read activity for years
It’s not the typical “end of life” server HDD with 80k hours of 24/7 full use
This makes me think: if chia and similar coins simply generated the monopoly money by “finding the right numbers on the right rainbow table” … were they a covert way for some government to have a distributed decryption network? Especially thinking how popular it was in china
Not really. Wrong type of math, not practical to reuse to break cryptography. There’s similar techniques that can be used against some algorithms, but not when set up like that.
Data storage devices are the last items you wanna buy second hand though. A drive failing could mean much more than just having to buy a new one.
HDDs used for chia mining or similar shitcoins have been used for just a full wipe to create the huge rainbow table or whatever the shitcoin needed and then left on idle with very little read activity for years
It’s not the typical “end of life” server HDD with 80k hours of 24/7 full use
This makes me think: if chia and similar coins simply generated the monopoly money by “finding the right numbers on the right rainbow table” … were they a covert way for some government to have a distributed decryption network? Especially thinking how popular it was in china
Not really. Wrong type of math, not practical to reuse to break cryptography. There’s similar techniques that can be used against some algorithms, but not when set up like that.
Used enterprise drives are amazing value though. With enough redundancy in a RAID array it’s a great way to get storage in bulk.