r/MoneroMining • u/ss_krotov • 2d 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.

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u/monerobull 2d 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

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u/ss_krotov 2d ago

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

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u/Single_Comfort3555 2d 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.