While we are still cautiously optimistic that the new cryptocurrency called Chia (not to be confused with pet plants) won't actually lead to a shortage of SSDs and HDDs, we might be worried when we see this monstrous motherboard coming out. This motherboard has 32 SATA ports and looks like an ideal candidate for a Chia mining farm.

Unlike cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin and Ethereum, Chia is built on a cryptographic technology called proof-of-space-and-time, rather than a proof-of-work model. Mining is done using unused storage space rather than GPUs or special ASIC hardware.

The worst-case scenario for PC gamers is that Chia will break out in a big way, devastating the HDD and SSD markets and creating yet another hardware category shortage that will make PC manufacturing in 2021 already tragic. But that's getting ahead of ourselves; when Chia becomes available for trading next week, it will likely see an initial surge in popularity and then sink into the background (maybe even beyond).

Seagate hinted at this possibility, saying it sees "growing demand" for storage products for cryptocurrency mining (and possibly Chia), but added that it is "still a little early to know how long it will last." Also, prices and availability of HDDs and SSDs appear to be stabilizing outside of China, although dealers are hoarding storage products in hopes of cashing in down the road. Fingers crossed that this trend continues.

If not, we may see more motherboards like Onda's B365 D32-D4 Magic Edition with lots of SATA ports. To be clear, this is not necessarily Chia-specific. The earliest example I could find is a 2013 Reddit thread focused on the B250 D32-D3 with 32 SATA ports.

It is also worth noting that this newer variant is based on Intel's B365 chipset, which is over two years old at this point; Chia has also been around since 2018, but there is no evidence that this motherboard exists specifically for cryptocurrency mining.

Nevertheless, if Chia becomes widely available, it may be used for this purpose. [At 530mm x 320mm (20.9" x 12.6"), it is considerably larger than an extended ATX (E-ATX) motherboard. [Other features include dual LAN ports, HDMI and VGA outputs, various USB 3.0 and 2.0 ports, PCI Express x16 and x1 slots (one each), and two DIMM slots supporting up to 32GB of DDR4-2800 memory.

No price was mentioned, but according to WCCFTech, it is already in the hands of Chia Minor.