Today Sabrent teased a new Chia Plotting SSD, with the Sabrent PlotRipper. The details are a bit sparse still, but this may be the first SSD designed specifically for Chia plotting. Other companies have rebranded existing SSDs for Chia, this drive is entirely new. The company is releasing two SSDs in this Chia family, the Sabrent PlotRipper and Sabrent PlotRipper Pro, with the main benefit and difference being the higher TBW in the Pro model.
Today Sabrent teased a new Chia Plotting SSD, with the Sabrent PlotRipper. The details are a bit sparse still, but this may be the first SSD designed specifically for Chia plotting. Other companies have rebranded existing SSDs for Chia, this drive is entirely new. The company is releasing two SSDs in this Chia family, the Sabrent PlotRipper and Sabrent PlotRipper Pro, with the main benefit and difference being the higher TBW in the Pro model.
The Chia cryptocurrency is based on proofs of space and time, versus proof of work many other cryptocurrencies are based on. Chia calls itself “green” as it relies on storage (fast, SSD, storage for plotting and high capacity, HDD, for farming) versus GPU/CPUs. Basically, anyone with space storage should be able to plot and farm Chia to some degree.
We’ve written several guides on Chia over the last month including the best budget Chia plotting rig, the top 4 cheap SSDs for Chia plotting, the best Chia plot migration technique, Chia sync, improved cooling for Chia, our pick for the best budget Chia farming rig, farming on a Raspberry Pi, and how to manage multiple Chia plotters, farmers, and harvesters.
Sabrent PlotRipper The First SSD Specifically for Chia
As we laid out in our cheap SSD guide, users need to look at endurance and write performance to get an idea of what is best for plotting. Again we want to point that the highest write performance isn’t always best as low endurance would cause the drive to burn up pretty quick. With this in mind, the new Sabrent drive comes with what it calls LifeXtention for a claimed 18x better performance.
The drive leverages the new Phison E18 controller and Micron NAND combo, which delivers very impressive performance across the board. Then Sabrent overprovisions the drive to get much higher endurance. Essentially the 2TB Plotripper is an SSD with 4TB of NAND. The Pro version is probably 8TB of NAND overprovisioned to 2TB usable. Sabrent also claims the best unit cost for plotting, but without numbers, that is hard to ascertain.
In terms of endurance, the non-Pro is a 2TB drive with 10,000 TBW. The Pro comes in two capacities and endurances: 1TB with 27,000 TBW, and 2TB with 54,000 TBW.
54,000 TBW Really?
Now while we are very much inclined to follow on the train that claims this drive has no equal in terms of endurance, there are a lot of questions. The TBW for this drive far exceeds that of high-endurance U.2 enterprise NVMe SSDs and starts to get close to Intel Optane. Look at the 3DWPD Intel P5600 SSD which is in the 8TB class (6.4TB actual) for instance. It’s rated at 35,000TBW. The 1.5TB Intel Optane rated for 30 DWPD is specced at an endurance of 164,000 TBW.
So here we are, left with a consumer-class SSD with a TBW endurance figure that somehow falls in between a mixed workload enterprise SSD and Intel Optane. Both of the Intel drives follow a specific JEDEC standard for endurance, which is currently omitted from the Sabrent information.
To be clear, we are cautiously optimistic on this drive. If it lives up to these numbers, that’s fantastic news, even forgetting the high price of the drives. At the end of the day, it’s their warranty department that will need to deal with claims if a drive wears out too fast. And at this pace, there are a lot of aggressive Chia plotters out there who will give it the old college try.
Availability and pricing have not been released. We’re working to get our hands on these drives ASAP to dig into the endurance and performance claims more deeply.
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