I stumbled upon an interview with the actual Chia <s>miner</s> farmer, he claims best SSDs will stay healthy for about a year, and having SSD is a must. Plotting should be done on an SSD (preferably as an NVMe), since this process involves creating 300Gb temp file on the same device that will be used to form a plot. Actual interview [0] is in Russian, but I guess you could get a decent Google Translate-processed English translation . [0] https://habr.com/ru/company/ruvds/blog/554046/

This was really precious, spasibo! Especially for warnings on [not] using regular disks.

But from what I learned there, Chia is not a consumer’s tech, cause mainnet already requires huge TBW per dollar ratio, which ubiquitous Samsung EVO/Pro and alikes cannot do. It goes miners-are-special-hardware route again, sadly.

I wonder if it's feasible to use a ramdrive for the temp file. Or maybe the miners already run the number and decided it's cheaper to burn a stack of SSD every once in a while instead of investing in nodes with huge ram.

That would only be with enterprise class SSDs. I’ve been plotting on both consumer and enterprise and the former’s lifespan won’t be more than 3-4 months.