Don't know why all the negativity against HDD mining. Yes, it's taken a huge hit in profitability along with everything else in Crypto but development continues. Obviously with the bear market I probably wouldn't run out a spend thousands on a new system, but the goal of Chia at least has been for people wanting to participate, to be able to start with spare capacity they already have. I got in pretty early on Chia using a high end system I was planning to build anyway. Luckily I was able to recoup about a third of my total cost before the market tanked. I repurposed one of my 18TB drives I used for plots but continue to run the farmer solo. Today I managed to farm two blocks in one day with only 56 TiB of plots.

Once the market recovers as it always does, with ETH moving to POS and the focus on green mining, coins like Chia will be in a good position for the next bull run. The development team continues improvements to build the community. If i've learned anything from mining since 2014, it's that miners that are focused on the long term and are able to continue to mine during bear markets are the ones that do best.