And what happens if the SSDs break? You lose your plot? Has to be right - since it's proof of space? But what then is the use of burning through SSDs so fast?
the SSDs are used just to create the plots, once the plots are created they can be moved into HDDs where they get farmed (checked to see if they can solve blocks for the blockchain)
It can be, just set up a RAM disk and use that as your temporary drive. It's exactly what I'm doing to fill my tiny 12TB Raspberry Pi farm. Your plotting rate won't be competitive (plotting in parallel on NVMEs turns out to be much faster).
Yeah, I plot an a DL580 with 512GB. Other than not having to worry about write durability there's not much gained though. GB per GB my ram drive is faster, but i can plot in parallel on my NVME drive because it's considerably larger.