That is easier to mine than Bitcoin. Well, I mean way cheaper. You just need a fast NVMe SSD and a bigger mechanical drive.

No point in RAID for the mechanical drive, RAID isn’t a backup, so there’s no benefit in running a RAID. Unless it’s a RAID 0, then you get more speed.

Chia looks to be in the AUR.

I wouldn’t recommend using BuyVM for Chia mining, the bus of the drive is shared, not dedicated, so you’ll probably get throttled or suspended. You’d slow the block storage to for other people. You might also mine nothing, there’s no pools. Depends how slow the block storage is.

I use caching with the SSD space, with my block storage. Nextcloud might be faster that way.

That might not use very much electricity. But, you’d have to out spec everybody else. Or get really lucky. I made $50 mining Ether a long time ago. I should have kept it though, it might be worth $700 or more now. That makes a lot of heat, I was using two GPUs. The apartment might have gotten mad if I kept doing it. Two GPUs under 100% load 24/7, might be a lot of electricity.