Oddbean

So... To SSD or HD? Context: BTC node. Requirements: low power, low noise, decent longevity. Possible concerns with an SSD: -write life -higher initial outlay for 2TB drive (as per advice) Concerns with HD: -Higher power consumption -no clue about reliability vs. SSD in this aoplication Thoughts? Experiences? #noderunner #node #node #btc #bitcoin #asknostr #startos

When you are doing the initial block download, any interruptions can “mess everything up”. Then you have to redo everything unless you are good at computer stuff. Even if you have unlimited home internet, you actually get charged over 1.2 TB in most cases. You don’t want to do this process more than you have to. Id recommend starting it the 2nd or 3rd day before the end of the month. The SSD always runs faster than any HDD and it’s not close. The benefit of having that initial download go right is the most important factor to me. I’ve also never had either HD type fail me. I don’t think there is that much rewrite going on either. You need Memory too.

The IOPS for a typical hard drive is about 300-500. Conversely for an SSD its 10s of thousands. Writes may be constrained to under 50000 while reads may generally be closer to 100000. Thats like a 100x difference. These numbers will vary by individual device comparison but suffice to say the SSD is going to be substantially faster for reads and writes. The Bitcoin IBD sync and verification will perform lots of reads and writes. On a raspberry pi 4 sync on an SSD may be about 5 days. On a hard drive, id guess 3-4 months. CPU is also a bottleneck, so if on a beefier refurbushed PC or NUC, the initial IBD and sync may be 1-2 days.

My tiny pc has a an 8th Gen i5-8600 (6 core, 35W TDP processor. I can't stand raspis. So just that alone pushes me to an SSD since it will be fast enough to not screw up. This is making enough sense now.

With HDD I've known many folks (including myself) that the IBD never completed (blocks come in faster than the HDD can validate block headers) Internet speed doesn't matter* Its all about how your device reads/writes data *any basic ISP package will suffice

For my understanding of SSD, the life expectancy is given for rewrites of the sectors. For a Bitcoin node you are only going to write them once never erase. An HDD being spinning 24/7 for years... The life expectancy is given by hours running independently if they are writting or not. Power consumption and noise defenitely weight a lot in this ecuation. The chain is already 1TB so imagine average 2MB blocks, a 2TB drive has space for 500.000 blocks, you have 9 years. If the blocks are full of pics then 4 years of space. p.s. did you see that? Time measured in space🤯

I'm perhaps not the best person to ask, but I can share a few things. Good SSDs can last a really long time, the common killer is write cycles(they can only be written to so many times). Different applications have different behavior when it comes to writes. With a bitcoin node, IIRC the blockchain itself is going to be write-once, meaning once the data is written its not likely to change. Indexes and such may be updated as frequently as a new block is written to the chain however. I don't think that's a lot of write cycles except the original block download. When we are talking concerns for write cycles, we are normally talking about something getting rewritten over and over again, like for example rows in a database that are constantly changing. Swap/virtual memory from the operating system could be another example. There might be some database/indexes for the blockchain, but I doubt they are going to be the amount of writes to cause me concern. SSDs should generally run cooler than HDD, and provide better performance in general. Also use less power. Hard drives have a shelf life based on several different things. How long its been spinning. Start count. Stop count. Heat. Perhaps 3-4 years is a good life time for a hard drive. A higher storage hard drive may be slightly more likely to fail due to the required accuracy of the head, as well as (if the storage is consumed) more movement of the heads and such. Also, watch out for SMR drives which I don't recommend. I would never rely on just one drive, SSDor HDD. Always get two and do a RAID, I recommend ZFS or BTRFS to prevent bit rot. Bits flip more often than people realize. Raid is not a backup, raid can keep you running when eventually one drive does die. All drives eventually die. Backups: no matter the storage solution, I recommend offline backups of critical data taken regulary. I'm not certain its necessary to backup the blockchain (thousands of nodes are doing that for you already) unless you need it back FAST. Long story short, I think good quality SSDs are perhaps the way to go for just a bitcoin node where you are concerned about heat, noise, and power consumption. I might have a different answer for databases, or file servers, depending on what's getting stored and how its being written, and how much space you need. I run two bitcoin nodes, both are on HDD, because I don't care about speed, power, noise, heat, and I've got a good raid setup as well as good backups. I save the SSDs for gaming and higher perf applications instead.

whatever you have laying around! you don't need a brand new system for a node. the first sync gonna take a while, when this is done I would recommend a backup. if your harddrive fails you don't need to start syncing at 0 again.