The Onda B365 D32-D4 Magic Edition Chia mining motherboard features a total of 32 SATA ports to support up to 32 SATA-based HDD and SSD storage devices. The Motherboard is built on the Intel B365 chipset, comes with 4 DDR4 memory slots, a PCIe Gen 3.0 x16, and a PCIe 3.0 x1 slot. Onda claims that using all the SATA ports this board can hold up to 448 TB of massive storage. To power the SATA ports, the motherboard features a total of six 6-pin connectors.
Dimensions for the board are 53cm x 31cm, this looks like an mATX motherboard that has been extended to house all the extra SATA connections. I/O of this motherboard features two Gigabit Ethernet ports, a USB 2.0, four USB 3.0, 1 VGA, 1 HDMI, and power on/off buttons.
The mining process of Chia requires free space and runs several reading & writing operations. The endurance (TBW) also is very important and consumer SSDs cant be the optimal choice due to their lower endurance, and running these operations will significantly reduce the lifespan of an SSD. So using hard drives and data center SSDs are the best options, SSDs are also necessary for the plotting process as HDDs are very slow. With Chia mining on the rise, we might see many more boards available like these.
Due to Chia mining, the prices of hard drives have been going higher and we can see that in a table created by Tomshardware which illustrates just how much has the prices have risen over the last week:
| Hard Drive | Price Increase | Current Price | Lowest Price (1 week ago) |
|---|---|---|---|
| Western Digital WD Gold 18TB | 40.4% | $1,231 | $877 |
| Seagate Exos X18 18TB | 66.7% | $1,077 | $646 |
| Seagate SkyHawk AI 18TB | 39.4% | $923 | $662 |
| Seagate Exos X16 16TB | 60.6% | $816 | $508 |
| Seagate IronWolf 16TB | 56.2% | $814 | $521 |
| Ultrastar DC HC550 16TB | 30.3% | $662 | $508 |
