Chia is a cryptocurrency using a block chain technology.and it uses what is called a proof of space and work consensus mechanism. In short to farm anything using proof of space and work you need to be able to holds large amount of data and then be able to provide that data to prove that you actually held it for example there might be one million terabytes of data on the network and the protocol might be asking you for around 200 bits at a certain location on your hard drive well if you can provide what it originally gave you it will reward you for allowing it to store data in space on your hard-drive and for for the work that you did to put it there. Winning is like playing bingo you fill up your bingo card with the different letters and then the network randomly
chooses which parts get called and if you get called and you can prove that you held the information that the network originally gave you then you win bingo.

So when it comes to Chia there are two main processes the first is Plotting and the second is Farming.
Plotting is essentially putting the data on a storage device that you own and farming is checking that you still have it on that storage device.

SSDs (Solid State Drives)

So before we continue you need to know two key terms SSD this is an acronym that stands for solid state drive and this is a form of a storage device that can read and write quickly it is one of the fastest and affordable ways to read and write data, although there is a limit to these until they no longer work next up the acronym HDD stands for hard drive disk. this is a form of storage device that can read and write quit slowly but it is reliable affordable and has been used for years you can store more data on a HDD than you can on an HDD for the same price.

Plotting

Moving forward lets go over what is Plotting is. Plotting is a process of putting a bunch of data on a hard-drive essentially you were doing a ton of math and filling up a bunch of ones and zeros on a hard-drive during this calculation process you could you a hard-drive disk but it would be very inefficient and technically you could uses USB thumb drive but it will be very slow and unreliable for this process most people use an SSD because as it will create the finalized plots the fastest Plotting is very intensive on SSDs though in fact some people are plotting so much that it completely wears out.

Farming

Farming, Farming is the process of having the network that you actually check you did the work to store the ones and zeros on those drives. So using and algorithm the entire chia network will randomly pick a part of a network and check if they still have the data that it decided to give them and if it is it will reward whoever kept that data there with some chia.

But now you probably thinks that why should I do all the work and burn my HDD’s and SSD’s.
Well right now in early may of 2021 farming chia is crazy profitable with current calculations an 8 TB hard-drive which costs roughly around $200 on amazon can earn roughly 0.73 chia a month. and if you are wondering the network size is 2.9 EiB now if you sold those chia at today’s market price
you would earn $809 per month (Change according to the market price) as the network grows and more people join it this profit rate will go down and you also have to include the fact that the price of Chia may rise or plummet.

You can find the complete details regarding how to plot and farm Chia from the URL https://github.com/Chia-Network/chia-blockchain

Cheers!!!