We can’t address the specifics of Chia’s system. Drive performance depends on how the user chooses to use it. Seagate’s golden rule on how to optimize any storage—to prolong its lifetime and ensuring the best performance—is this: Always choose the right storage to your purpose.
In the crypto world, it pays to use a combination of high-reliability, enterprise-class SSDs and large-capacity hard drives. Given the importance of data protection and data durability, it is best to use a hardware RAID or erasure-coded solution featuring drive and even controller redundancy. This type of configuration would maximize uptime and data protection.
Applications vary, of course, but in general crypto involves three main scenarios, with the following storage recommendations:
1).
If a particular cryptocurrency penalizes lost capacity, choose storage systems that offer additional controller protection (erasure coding and RAID), which should prevent that from happening.
2).
For the transaction-intensive workloads such as data sealing, SSDs are a good bet that helps achieve application performance.
3).
For capacity-intensive workloads, cost-efficient and space-maximizing hard drives are the way to go.