Oddbean new post about login | logout That's the next step for me when I can buy a 2TB SSD.
You can easily get away with a hard drive if it's local to the machine. I think it's BS to require an SSD. You only need to worry about inital sync. Plus you're going to blow though your SSD's write duration pretty quickly in a node scenario. Most el-cheapo multi layer (yeah even samsung) have piss-poor write durability
I need to get a drive to fit my tiny pc. How long are we talking? If it's every 3-5 years, I don't mind using an SSD.
Hard to say. I've had dozens of ssds and hdds fail, some on the low side, some on the mid side, but I've never had an SSD last longer than expected (above it's average write duration). I just replace all drives after about 3-4 years of 24/7 usage.
I suppose that 24/7 block writing is actually hard on an SSD. Hmmmm.... It might still be worth it for me to use an SSD for non-speed reasons, though.
it's not that bad unless you're re-syncing from scratch all the time, a node isn't going to do 24/7 block writing, it's the initial sync that's heavy in writing, and after that there's a new block approximately every 10 minutes which is pretty much negligible in write traffic compared to normal computer usage
it's the indexes that are the problem isn't the bitcoin core data directory have a separate folder for the raw blocks? or is that btcd it just occurred to me, the indexes typically are no more than 200gb, you could totally put the block files on btcd, at least, on a spinning disk and the rest on a 512gb SSD
My indexes are on a 32gb ramfs lol It's only used like 16gb so far. Block data is under the 'blocks/' directory and I have that mapped to a hard drive cluster.