While the price currently makes it a bad time to invest in hardware[which usually is what happens before scarcity and then price climbing up]I personally have been enjoying Chia.
My SSD's after 1000 plots are still in "good" health, however it was on 8 OLD USED SATA SSDs that can be bought very cheap. Don't forget the power of RAID 0 for plotting.
HDDs didn't even notice the storage.
So if they can handle it, I bet a single Corsair Pro could easily handle 1K and still be "good".
Took around 2 months non stop to make 1K plots.
Just hope the price goes up even more now that a 16TB External which costs around 400-500... only mines about $69 worth of coins each month under perfect luck.
There is no use case for the price to go up, the price went to $1600 because of chinese IOU 'investors' early in this year. They're gradually re-deploy their capital into other bets, the buyers of XCH are/were in ASIA, once the bitch-shit-coin loses its 'green odor' of vomit/feces, this thing will come back to earth like icarus.
What's your basis of increase in price? WHO is going to buy this shit-coin ranked at #2500 by coinmarketcap
XCH is going to about $5, then it might go to $50, just like its big brother bitcoin-gold, same team, same people same scam; mix&repeat,
the odd thing is the space keeps rising, now almost 25EB, ... goes to show the marketing, always wins the show; but its one thing to get western hairlips motivated by influencers on youtube, its another thing to keep the fickle chinese investors in the early IOU of XCH to stick around, given that the project is a big zero, no use, just empty promises
yep, the mining hw dollar problem, can't buy gpu's, and now can't buy hdd's
so let's see a new HDD 12TB is near $500 amazon, if you wait 2+ months back-ordered, today that will fetch $40/mo xch, but in two months it will fetch what? If space continues to grow it will fetch much less, and if the price goes below $100, it will never ROI the $500 HDD.
Like all pyramid scams, only the folks who got XCH for free ( pre-mine ) make real $$$ all else lose.