There are many articles on the internet dedicated to the topic of mining the cryptocurrency Chia Coin on SSD and HDD drives. The volumes are clear – the larger, the better, with an eye on the future. However, the hardware part of the PC causes disagreements. An increasing number of beginners in mining are asking the question – what computer is needed for mining Chia Coin.
What is clear about storage resources – drives
More is better. Ordinary 2.5-inch SSD drives are not recommended. The reason is simple – they are slow. If you want to earn money rather than talk about lack of income, you will need to buy at least a 2 TB NVMe drive. Moreover, focus should be on brands that provide higher write endurance. We have already written about this here.
With HDDs, the situation is worse. The complexity of mining is constantly increasing, as are the sizes of stored plots. The minimum is 12 TB. And this is the minimum at the time of writing this article. If you decide to mine Chia Coin, you will need to buy something with higher capacity.
What computer do you need for mining Chia Coin
There are disagreements at this stage. Initially, it was stated that mining could be performed on old PCs (socket 775 and above). This worked with small plot sizes (plots with information). Now (at the time of writing this article), one plot is 300 GB. And there are many of them on the drive (by storage volume). These plots need to be archived. And here, processor power is required.
A Core 2 Quad processor will not suffice. At minimum, a Core i7 9700 is needed. Even better – a Core i9 10900. With 10 cores and 20 threads, the chip can create 1 plot in 4 hours. With old processors, the same operation will take days or even weeks. And while you are creating plots and filling the hard drive, the complexity of calculations will increase again. To keep the processor running continuously, you need RAM (from 16 GB and above).
Why laptops are not suitable for mining Chia Coin
Even the most powerful laptop experiences throttling. This is when, due to heating, the processor reduces core frequencies by half or a third. And this affects system performance. There is no point in wasting time if you have a large personal computer at hand. A laptop is an alternative that can be used when a PC is not available.
