More often than not, the PC used market is a fairly good place to search out cheap {hardware} offers. I’ve purchased a good quantity of used and refurbished {hardware} in my life and had few complaints in regards to the expertise general. The trendy cryptocurrency market, nonetheless, has modified issues considerably.

Current information concerning the Chia cryptocurrency ought to have would-be eBayers on alert. As the value of Chia has cratered, many individuals are dumping their plotting and mining rigs on public sale websites. Right here, there’s an essential distinction: As a result of plotting is computationally and storage intensive, whereas storing plots is just not, most individuals plotted on quick SSDs and farmed their plots on exhausting drives.

A tough drive that’s been retired from Chia farming is sort of definitely in good situation. Knowledge could have solely been written to drive as soon as, or at most a handful of occasions. An SSD that’s been used for Chia mining, however, must be assumed to be a useless drive operating.

A put up from VNExpress.web notes that Chia miners are dumping drives now that costs have fallen and quotes a store proprietor in Ho Chi Minh Metropolis who claims the typical SSD lifespan when used for Chia plotting is roughly 80 days, in contrast with as a lot as a decade of regular utilization. That type of longevity hit is just not surprising, as a result of Chia is designed to write down much more information throughout the plotting course of than is definitely saved on the drive within the closing plot. If wear-leveling is the method of spreading writes throughout the drive to keep away from early put on in any given location, writing much more information throughout the plotting course of than the dimensions of the eventual plot is more-or-less the reverse. It is perhaps attainable to write down an software that was even more durable on SSDs intentionally, however the creator must work at it. This Chia blog post provides some information on how giant the discrepancy is:

Producing plot recordsdata is a course of referred to as plotting, which requires non permanent space for storing, compute and reminiscence to create, kind, and compress the info into the ultimate file. This course of takes an estimated 256.6GB of non permanent area, very generally saved on SSDs to hurry up the method, and roughly 1.3TiB of writes throughout the creation.

Shopping for new goes to be safer than trusting the used marketplace for SSDs for a short while, however let’s say you’re low on money however choose a used SSD over a used spinning disk. On this case, ExtremeTech recommends the next two-step course of:

1). Ask the vendor for some primary data on the drive, if the public sale doesn’t present it. When was it bought? What was it used for? Can the vendor present photographs of the drive operating an software like CrystalDiskInfo and provide the SMART information earlier than buy? (This is probably not notably seemingly, but it surely by no means hurts to ask).

2). Upon receipt, chuck the drive into your system and fireplace up the reporting device of your selection. There are a number of utilities that can provide you a primary report in your drive’s SMART standing, together with CDI. Right here’s what a report on a Essential MP600 2TB check SSD seems to be like:

This drive has written ~60TB of knowledge all through its lifetime and has been powered on 9,963 hours. Chia didn’t launch till final Might, so any drive purchased new and used for Chia mining goes to have a a lot smaller variety of power-on hours. Provided that 80 days is definitely an extended lifespan than we’ve heard previously for an SSD plotting Chia, we’d anticipate Chia mining drives to have a really excessive ratio of TB written per hour of exercise.

This isn’t an ideal, fool-proof methodology, however most SSDs ought to have a comparatively low variety of drive writes. Even for those who’re a gamer who crammed a complete 2TB drive with Steam and EGS titles, you most likely don’t delete and rewrite these titles on a weekly foundation. The variety of full drive writes an SSD is specced for varies by drive, however an enormous quantity of knowledge written in a time interval that works out to only 60-120 days of utilization must be seen with suspicion, particularly if the vendor didn’t disclose any utilization patterns that will write a lot information to the drive.

For now, ET recommends you attempt to purchase new SSDs as a substitute of used at any time when attainable. For those who do purchase used, checking the SMART information on the drive ought to not less than offer you a heads-up on whether or not you had been lied to earlier than the SSD fails. SSDs used for plotting Chia can’t be trusted to stay useful for any size of time and shouldn’t be trusted for mission-critical information. Onerous drives used for farming must be tremendous and it’s not clear if anybody ever truly tried plotting on exhausting drives given their low efficiency.

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Opendoor, the net actual property big that lets folks straight purchase and promote houses on-line, has acquired Seattle-based startup Pro.com and San Francisco-based Skylight. Phrases of the offers weren’t disclosed. Each platforms, which provided digital house enchancment providers, will likely be discontinued.

“The additions of the Skylight and Professional.com groups will convey on like-minded founders and teammates who care deeply about reworking housing,” Opendoor CEO Eric Wu wrote in a blog post. “Whereas their platforms will likely be sunsetted, the expertise and know-how of every workforce will assist us scale and speed up our roadmap.”

San Francisco-based Opendoor is a frontrunner within the rising iBuyer market that features others equivalent to Seattle firms Zillow Group and Redfin. They goal to digitize the homebuying expertise from begin to end, and take a share of the almost $2 trillion actual property business. The pandemic has helped spur an iBuying spree with the acceleration of digital adoption equivalent to digital excursions, The Wall Street Journal reported final week.

Opendoor makes money on charges, much like an actual property fee, in addition to the distinction between what it buys and sells a house for. It additionally provides ancillary providers together with house repairs and mortgage.

The corporate, which went public final yr by way of a SPAC deal, is now working in additional than 40 markets and acquired a report 8,494 houses within the second quarter of 2021.

The acquisition of Professional.com offers Opendoor a presence in Seattle for the primary time; the transfer might assist the corporate mine expertise from Zillow, Redfin, and Compass, which has a large operation in Seattle.

Based in 2013, Professional.com was a tech-powered common contracting platform. It aimed to streamline the house renovation course of, equivalent to a pricing engine that makes positive bids are correct, a mobile-friendly quote instrument, and different mission administration providers.

The corporate’s authentic mission was to rework the way in which owners discover, e-book and schedule house enchancment professionals equivalent to plumbers and painters. Nevertheless it later pivoted its enterprise mannequin from a house enchancment market to a common contractor itself, with a full roster of in-house development personnel.

Extra lately, Professional.com launched “Benchmark Quote,” which analyzed a number of bids from common contractors.

Professional.com co-founders Matt Williams and Raji Subramanian will be part of Opendoor because of the deal, however some workers is not going to be transitioning. Opendoor is bringing on greater than 50 complete workers from each Professional.com and Skylight; Professional.com at the moment has roughly 70 workers, and Skylight has round 37 workers, based on LinkedIn. Skylight launched 5 years in the past.

Professional.com laid off 52 workers at little greater than a yr in the past, or a few third of its workforce, on account of what it described as impacts of house development from the pandemic.

The startup raised a $33 million spherical in January 2019. Whole funding so far was north of $60 million. Buyers embody WestRiver Group; Redfin; DFJ (Threshold Ventures); Madrona Enterprise Group; Maveron; Two Sigma Ventures; Redpoint Ventures; and Bezos Expeditions. Redfin CEO Glenn Kelman joined the corporate’s board after Redfin invested in Professional.com in 2019.

On the time, Williams mentioned Redfin and Professional.com have been exploring a partnership for Redfin Now, Redfin’s iBuyer program, to assist pace up renovation tasks. Now it seems Opendoor is utilizing that technique.

Williams beforehand ran Seattle-based LiveBid.com, which was acquired by Amazon in 1999. He stayed at Amazon till 2010 and later spent two years as CEO of Digg earlier than launching Professional.com in 2013. He was impressed after a painful expertise reworking his own residence, and watching his stepfather handle a development agency.

Subramanian labored at Amazon from 1999 to 2006. She did a brief stint at Yahoo and launched a engineering outsourcing firm known as Radien Software program.

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This web-based academic bundle, valued at $1,791, is right for JavaScript coders that need to develop their skilled repertoire. It options 9 self-directed programs that introduce college students to JavaScript, React, and Redux and affords hands-on coaching that helps them grasp every with relative ease. The programs come extremely rated by previous college students and every is facilitated by consultants like David Armendariz and Maksym Rudnyi, so that is high quality instruction that would pay dividends.

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