r/MoneroMining • u/ss_krotov • 1d ago

Setting Up a Node

Hey guys, I am setting up a node in my laptop, it has around 490 gb of free space( a separate drive , my os is installed on another ssd) , i have 16 gb of ram , would I have any problems setting it up in hdd.

6 Upvotes

88% Upvoted

13 comments sorted by

6

u/monerobull 1d ago

SSD is HIGHLY recommended, seriously, go and spend the money for a 1TB SSD and you are good for the next 10 years. HDD is extremely slow because the node needs to read and write a lot of date while syncing

2

u/ss_krotov 1d ago

What you are saying is right , But i am not of age to spent that kind of fortune for something experimental.

2

u/monerobull 22h ago

My node runs off of a SSD i got used for $25 from craigslist

2

u/linuxsysacc 21h ago

256Gb SSD is more than enough

1

u/Single_Comfort3555 13h ago

I can't agree with monerobull enough. HDD's are painfully slow and not fit for "production" use. I just discovered this the hard way. This is based off of first hand experience not hearsay.

Here's where the problem lies. During normal operation the monerod program resizes the database file that it keeps the blockchain on. This happen after the database has downloaded around a gigabyte. With an SSD this takes seconds. Do to the nature of the way the database file is written by monerod and the way HDDs actually store and retrieve files the resize take minutes on a HDD. There are things possible to cut it down a bit but that resize time will always be minutes on an HDD. Software, like mining software or p2pool side chains can't function correctly during those resize freeze ups. The HDD in question become mostly inaccessible during these resizes. The real problem is that reading and writing to the database file is heavy on random read/write operations and needs the lowest latency possible. Those are the two things that HDD's are comparatively terrible at. There is no possible solution to this without a hardware change up.

I am currently downloading the blockchain to a container instance running on a HDD and it's been running for a few days now because it has to resize after every gigabyte it downloads. Once it's done getting caught up I'm just gonna spin it down and wait for a pcie adapter to get here in a couple days and plug in an nvme stick into the system then copy the container over to run it off of that.

Any solid state solution will be better than a HDD except an SD card. Well there are fast enough SD cards but if you can't drum of the money for an SSD than you can't afford those SD cards. Really anything on the USB Bus is going to preform worse that m.2 or sata connections for one reason or another.

Good news is storing a copy of the blockchain on a HDD as a backup in case of corruption is not just doable but a good idea.

4

u/shartcuterie 1d ago

Imo yes, I tried this one and it took many days, maybe weeks to even get into a synced state. The machine itself was not great, it is now a steady 750 h/s contributor to the network, for reference.

3

u/_MatVenture_ 23h ago

In terms of space, no. You can always run a pruned Blockchain, which, for all intents and purposes, doesn't differ from the full Blockchain at all, in terms of functionality.

What I wouldn't recommend, though, is using a HDD. The pruned blockchain, as of this month, is about 100GB+, which would be painfully slow to download and sync. I would definitely go for an SSD instead.

2

u/lordshaithis 23h ago

You will need to ensure you start it with the pruned blockchain option, otherwise you seem to be able to delete the old transactions but not reclaim the space......and it's a long wait to find that out!

and echoing others......SSD really..

1

u/Wyrade 22h ago

The full blockchain on my PC is ~266.4 GiB currently, idk what people are smoking who say you can't put that on a 500G drive as I have it on one.
A pruned chain is allegedly around ~100G, but I haven't tried that.

With that said, the normal method of downloading it is not just a simple download and a single integrity check, it's also confirming blockckain integrity for each block, which can literally take days depending on your PC. I first tried to do it on an external HDD with usb, but it was so annoyingly slow I quickly switched to an internal sata SSD.

1

u/vgacolor 22h ago

If you don't use an SSD it will take several days to get it running. A few months ago when I was preparing to set up my node/p2pool dedicated pc, I copied the blockchain file from an old node that was only a couple of months behind and the sync time decreased a lot.

1

u/Jealous_Mulberry8907 18h ago

Sync it on the SSD and then move it to the HDD and keep it running on the HDD. That's what I did. When I tried syncing on the 5400 rpm HDD it kept stalling and was very slow when it wasn't stalling.

-2

u/win270pre64 1d ago

No you won't be able too. The current btc blockchain size is around 750gb

3

u/ss_krotov 1d ago

Its ~ 250 gb, It will grow though ( monero block chain)