In Russia, retail prices for hard drives have risen sharply. Representatives of retail chains and platforms told Vedomosti about this. Depending on the volume, the cost of drives has increased by 2-3 times. Presumably, the reason was the popularity of the new cryptocurrency Chia, which requires large storage facilities to mine.

For example, 8 TB drives will now cost customers 40 thousand rubles, while in early April they were sold for 20 thousand, and 10 TB – 90 thousand rubles instead of 30 thousand. The sellers of the Savyolovsky market in Moscow told the correspondent of the publication about this.

The information is confirmed by Yandex.Market statistics. For example, Seagate SkyHawk for 8 TB has doubled in price since the beginning of April – up to 39 rubles, and the 990-TB version of the drive has risen in price 10 times. In addition, many models have simply run out.

Natalya Selikhova, head of Computers and Laptops at Ozon, linked the trend with the launch of the Chia cryptocurrency, which requires large storage facilities to mine. According to her, the volume of discs sold in April 2021 reached 800 PB, which is twice more than last year’s figure for the same period. Selikhova also clarified that further prices will depend on the popularity of Chia – a multiple increase in the cost of equipment is possible.

Mobile Research Group analyst Eldar Murtazin believes that the key reason for the growth was not the launch of Chia, but the transition of employees from offices to remote work. In his opinion, in the future this may lead to an increase in prices for computer equipment by 15%.

A possible storage crisis became known in mid-April. Then the manufacturer of computer equipment Jiahe Jinwei said that it had already sold all solid-state drives with a volume of 1 and 2 TB. They were sold out because Chia mining requires not only HDDs, but also high-speed SSDs. In the future, the company plans to release a special drive for mining and will try to impose restrictions to prevent miners from buying up the rest of the drives.