HDD farming as an eco-friendly alternative to mining is "out of this world". No other major project uses it. Burst was a rugpull and along with filecoin and storj, those coins were difficult to "mine" and use a lot of noise/energy. This is the first legit proof of capacity coin and it should attract miners considering the GPU/computer chip shortage.
I see a couple of problems with HDD mining. First of all, if the mining is profitable, some people will start building huge storage farms, just like is done with PoW mining hardware, and it will use a lot of energy and materials. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox.
Second, assuming that home farming with your existing general-purpose hardware remains feasible, it has a huge drawback compared to CPU or GPU mining. For example, I've bought GPUs for work but they can spend most of their time mining. In most cases the miner can stay running in the background all the time. In some cases I'll need the whole GPU to my work, but even then, I can easily resume mining after that.
This doesn't work with HDD farming. If I want to use that drive for something else, I first have to delete the plotfiles, and then later regenerate those plots with a lot of CPU time and energy. So you will need dedicated farming drives, or at least some dedicated drive space.
I've been testing out small-time Chia farming since just before the mainnet launch, and I even bought a new drive for it, knowing I can still use it for something else if this doesn't work out nicely. I like playing with new technologies in their early stages, and I guess I have a soft spot for Bram Cohen -- I remember when Bittorrent came out, and I like coding in Python myself. I'd like to be proved wrong about the above reservations
