WHEN THE NEW cryptocurrency chia was announced, it was expected to be a boon for hard drive manufacturers. Chia uses storage capacity rather than processing power to mine, employing a process called Proof of Space (PoS), rather than the traditional Proof of Work (PoW). The more capacity you can devote, the more you can mine. In China, a chia boom has caused drive shortages and pushed prices up by 50 percent or more. Already we have specialized chia motherboards, covered in SATA sockets and little else. By early May, chia was consuming 2.3 million terabytes of space in China, expanding by around 10 percent a day. The president of chia, Gene Hoffman, admitted that it had “kind of destroyed the short-term supply chain.” Chia has indeed proved a welcome fillip for HDD sales. Seagate and Western Digital both report much higher sales. Both companies are now said to be “evaluating” the long-term effect of chia, and WD has increased production of its 18TB range.