[kevingadd]

Yes, presumably as a measure to make it harder to scale the plotting process (to make it more "fair"), it apparently does a ton of reads and writes across the whole region being plotted, so it will quickly exhaust the total number of write cycles available on the drive. A cheaper drive will be effectively destroyed (high quality drives can survive more write cycles, so they're comparatively okay.) I would have assumed it just linearly computed the whole plot to be farmed, but presumably that would make it vulnerable to some sort of attack where you create a "winning" plot on demand.

You could theoretically plot on a RAMdisk to avoid this problem, but the necessary amount of RAM would be incredibly expensive, so it's unlikely that many people will do it.

See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=twwyBdsRYL4