• Wispy2891@lemmy.world
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    17 hours ago

    There are a lot of “refurbished” drives from when the Chia bubble popped (a useless shitcoin that wasted HDD space with garbage data as a proof of cryptographic work)

    • calcopiritus@lemmy.world
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      16 hours ago

      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.

      • Wispy2891@lemmy.world
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        15 hours ago

        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

        • Wispy2891@lemmy.world
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          15 hours ago

          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

          • Natanael@infosec.pub
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            10 hours ago

            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.

      • a1studmuffin@aussie.zone
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        14 hours ago

        Used enterprise drives are amazing value though. With enough redundancy in a RAID array it’s a great way to get storage in bulk.