You're rehashing mainstream news articles that gloss over crucial details.
"Plotting" is the act of filling the hard drive with the random data. It only needs to be done once, after which the data can be used to "farm" indefinitely.
Farming is very low on energy requirements and doesn't damage the drives.
Plotting can be accelerated by doing it on a fast SSD, and transferring the plot data on large capacity HDDs for farming. This saves time at the cost of writing a lot of data on the dedicated plotting SSD, which trashes consumer grades SSDs if done continuously.
Plotting can also be done on the HDDs themselves. It's slower but won't noticeably reduce the HDD's lifespan.
When Chia was launched, there was a lot of speculation and farmers were competing to be first to finish as many plots as possible, so most were plotting on SSDs, and many on consumer SSDs. That's were the "Chia destroys hard drives" myth came from.
"Plotting" is the act of filling the hard drive with the random data. It only needs to be done once, after which the data can be used to "farm" indefinitely.
Farming is very low on energy requirements and doesn't damage the drives.
Plotting can be accelerated by doing it on a fast SSD, and transferring the plot data on large capacity HDDs for farming. This saves time at the cost of writing a lot of data on the dedicated plotting SSD, which trashes consumer grades SSDs if done continuously.
Plotting can also be done on the HDDs themselves. It's slower but won't noticeably reduce the HDD's lifespan.
When Chia was launched, there was a lot of speculation and farmers were competing to be first to finish as many plots as possible, so most were plotting on SSDs, and many on consumer SSDs. That's were the "Chia destroys hard drives" myth came from.