In general, for larger (> 10TB) drives, most definitely. < 10TB drives have been mostly unaffected.

The direct impact on larger drives is entirely dependent on brand (Toshiba's Enterprise drives appear to be less in demand than Seagate's Exos, for instance), recording process (CMR versus SMR), and, to a lesser extent, power consumption. In virtually all instances though, the price has jumped significantly [0]. 16TB Exos more than doubled, for instance [1]. In large parts of Europe, large drives have been back-ordered since the beginning of April; my orders are scheduled for delivery in August, yet I would be surprised if I saw anything before September.

[0] https://www.tomshardware.com/news/analysis-hdd-prices-skyroc...

[1] https://camelcamelcamel.com/product/B07SPFPKF4

I've been watching drive prices, it's hard to say exactly why, but around mid April disk prices at Newegg and amazon jumped significantly. One drive that had been $300, jumped to $400, $500, and even spiked to $800 for a bit. By Jun 1st had dropped to $550, and only this week has dropped for $400. Still above the original $300, but at least a not terribly painful premium.

Chia mining-before-transactions-are-released -> Chia transactions released -> Chia price at a high price -> Chia price halves shortly after, turns out virtually impossible for US users to get on any of the exchanges handling XCH

Doesn't look like it, at least in the EU. You can check for yourself here[0]. Just find a drive such as this one[1] and check the chart on the upper-right corner for price history.

[0] https://geizhals.eu/?cat=hde7s&xf=1080_SATA+1.5Gb%2Fs~1080_S...

[1] https://geizhals.eu/toshiba-enterprise-capacity-mg08aca-16tb...

Not for hyperscalers like BackBlaze. They have contracts with specific purchase quotas and guaranteed price deltas. Chia has certainly affected prices on the secondary markets, there hasn't been a better time in the past decade to be a secondary server "junk" seller on eBay! NetApp 4246 JBOD's are going for $1000! Absolutely insane!

Not yet, but when Chia pools become available the mining will take off and hdd prices will most likely rice

Chia is a literal scam.

There's a massive amount of premined chia controlled by the "chia strategic reserve".

It will take a decade for the amount of mined value to equal the pre-mined value.

I looked into Chia mining as a hobby and was directed to Burstcoin. I don't know much about either, but Burstcoin advocates claim it's the "better" PoC.

Note: I went to double check something on the Burstcoin website and realized today, June 24th they changed their name to Signum - https://www.burst-coin.org/

Why not do something useful with the space like FileCoin or Arweave?

Cool thanks! I didn't know about either, I'll check them out. Are you suggesting Burstcoin is not useful? How do the 4 (Chia/Burst/FileCoin/Arweave) compare? What are FileCoin and Arweave used for now?

FWIW the Burstcoin community have been very helpful, and they have a Windows client which was nice for a "hobbyist" like me.

Bitcoin may be useful but the calculations done for its proof-of-work don't do anything useful outside of Bitcoin. The same is true of Chia. It uses up hard drive space as a mechanism to validate transactions but IIRC that space is essentially random bytes. On the other hand, with arweave or filecoin you are storing files for people.

Do note that there is very little current use of Filecoin storage. Right now it's not too different from Chia.