Bitcoin Forum

Hey folks,
Recently have installed a SSD on one of my machines and got impressed with its speed.
I run several crypto wallets of altcoins here and leave some staking.

Noticed the the computer lost a bit of performance over a couple of months.

What you think is best? installing the wallets on the SSD or the HD?

my first decision was to install it on the SSD but is there any chance that this is clogging the system and make performance slower?
would it be better to leave all wallets on the HD?

(I know the risks of cold VS hot wallet and usually don't keep substantial amounts on these hot wallets, just wondering about the performance here, not safety)

I don't have PoS wallets on, but I can try to give some educated guesses.

Clearly SSD is faster. Also usually smaller because of its price. It also has a certain lifetime (in number of writes afaik).
I think that if your wallets are in sync and loaded up, the SSD doesn't help much extra. So if your computer runs 24/7 HDD is still fine imho.
Instead, if you start your computer often so the wallets have to load up, SSD is the answer.

Also, if you remain on HDD and you install a new wallet, you better symlink the chain data folder to the SSD until it syncs, then stop, move the final data where it should be and run again.


SSD is great for keeping the files your computer needs to read often. Operating system, program files, some of the games are the ones tho keep on SSD on the first place.
Wallets.. it depends. Of course, if a wallet is poorly written it may try to do a lot of unnecessary disk operations. But that I didn't take into account. The rest depends on how you use everything.

Neither of the both to me ,simply because you will still end up running windows on either one of the two ,keeping coins and tokens on your pc is high risk

With past experience I will go for SSD over HD because SSD is strong and very longer lasting than HD but I don't like using windows wallet for two reasons.
1) to send coins out you have to fully sync the whole blockchain
2) window PC easily get infected with viruses ,spywares ,walwares ,trojan etc ,
To me mobile wallet is better and you don't need to sync the whole blockchain

I use HDD. I do not see much difference between the use of CDD in SSD for installing cryptocurrency wallets. If you use SSD, this gives you only advantage in the speed of blockchain loading and its synchronization. If you do not mind the extra money, then why not use the SSD.

I don't think I would advise you to store your coin in any external device apart from a hardware wallet because this devices are very vulnerable and they can fail at anytime,.

I remember when I had a lot of coins given to me by a project I actually worked on and when they started to trade on the exchange, I wasn't able to withdraw the funds to the exchange because I woke up one fateful morning to discover that my hard drive is not functioning anymore and my only hope was to format the hard-drive losing everything.

I don't have SSD but base on the feedbacks that I've read about it, no doubt that it's faster than HD. I don't think that there will be that much difference if you will run several crypto wallets on any of them.

Yes, SSD is faster but overall specs of your computer should be considered. When I'm in question like this and I have the capacity to try them out, I'd take an experiment which I can see you are good to conduct it. Try it out and see what makes you comfortable.

thanks for the answers.

first: I know about the risks of keeping hot wallets and I do my own research on making it secure and avoiding nasty internet stuff/keeping the computer clean.
also: I'd never keep my whole portifolio on hot wallets.
the topic is not about that, as I stated.

I've been running some system optimization and restarting more often.

my biggest question was if blockchain frequent downloads would end up messing up with SSD performance or life.
but after some more research I'm convinced that this is problably not the case.

more tests would be needed to verify if there's a really big speed difference on installing it on SSD VS HD.
but I don't have the time neither the desire to run it all right now

(would love to read about it if somebody else did it, though)

cheers!

for altcoins a simple HD will probably do the work for you because they don't really need that much activity since mot of their chains are not used at all, and you can also always use light weight clients or web wallets like MEW,...
but of course it is obvious that SSD is hundreds of times faster and better for doing literary anything and that includes running cryptocurrency nodes.

The question is what are those wallets that you would love to run with your SSD?

Ofcourse as time goes by and it is being used, performance makes it durability lessen in time but I don't think it will be easy for a new SSD to get into that point with what you are worrying with. If you use lite wallets, you don't have to think of network downloads.

Technically SSD is faster than HDD but sometimes you can't even notice the difference when its still new, when years passed you can tell the difference that SSD is still fast. HDD as it grows older its getting slower. So I chose SSD over HDD.

you must have never tried them in comparison to each other!
HDD speed doesn't even come close to SSD's speed in reading and writing data. the slowest SSD is ridiculously faster compared to the fastest HDDs.

besides age should not really affect the speed of a hard disk unless you severely damage it. i currently own old HDD that is still functioning like its day 1.

I would always suggest SSD. But for old machines, you can go for a hybrid option.

If your motherboard has m2 slot, it will be a lot easier to place ssd. On the other hand, replace your hdd with DVD-writer slot and place ssd as a primary hard disk. When you upgrade your PC with SSD, it is always recommended to boot OS from SSD. You will spot the difference immediately.

With small blockchains is no problem. With bigger ones it is. Also if you bought computer few years ago your SSD should be small if you just bought computer then probably now.  Thing is that you can do totally fine with HDD. You will not do anything much slower beside the initial sync that happens only once.  I have few years old computer with 2 disks one is SSD where i have my operation stem and other one is HDD for storage also storage of blockchains.  I am to lazy to buy new SSD drive now when they are cheap and replace it.

I think the biggest risk of SSD is that the data will be hard to recover after it is damaged.

To me the answer is 'neither' ,saving cryptocurrencies on windows pc is a very huge risk compare to other means like mobile wallets ,if you have only pc then make sure you don't use that pc for browsing the internet ,just save coins only on them or else you will get hijacked

While SSD is faster than HDD, its lifetime degraded after several thousand write cycles. I'm afraid that your SSD will not last long if you use it for a full node. I read a lot of people here use cheap VPS service for staking purpose, so you should consider that option.

I use HDD for most crypto wallets, but for some wallets, like Nano wallet is best to use the SSD because when update the wallet on HDD take a lot of time to start from 0.

I only use HDD until now, and I don't have a problem to install and run a few altcoin wallets. Some of them are work as a stake wallet, and the other is just a wallet to save my altcoin. But I heard that SSD would have a high-speed than the HDD but for me, if I can use altcoin wallet without any problem with HDD, then why I should choose SSD? Even if I need to restart my computer many times which I don't need to restart in many times in a day and maybe it's once for 2 days.

I have a desktop with HDD and recently Upgraded to SSD  ;D. Have you read it wrong? I said "Technically SSD is faster". My point is when both are brand new with no damage when you open a crypto wallet probably it will open directly and sometimes you can't even notice the difference in performance but there is a difference of course.
Aren't you familiar with hdd bad sector it will cause your system boot slower and sometimes you will experience some lags.

there is no difference when you use a ssd or hdd for crypto wallets. most wallets are ram intensity, so don't think about ssd or hdd - just make sure you have some ram and cpu capacity.

I choice SSD, because its more faster than HDD. I think the wallet only need Internet Connecttion & Space Memory soo if you running cryptocurrency wallet with SSD or HDD you dont have any problem.

Put on ssd, just do not forget to do backup wallet.dat, thus you can not be afraid for the safety of their funds. After installing since the performance of the system has increased several times.

that's why periodic backups are a must!


do you even stake, bro?


SSD is 10x faster or more.
that's why youd choose it.


THANK YOU! that makes a lot of sense actually.
quite interesting!


besides the .dat I'd add that backinp up using dumpprivkey is even more important.
.dat can get corrupted.

SSD is the fastest but you shouldn't put it on your computer anyway. When staking use a low powered computer instead and leave it running all the time. HDD or SSD it doesn't matter if using a dedicated small staking computer

you definitely have a good point here.
was just considering different opinions and possibilities and wanted to hear the thoughts of the community here

I think SSD wallet are much faster, and i have a problem with HDD when i run Raiblock (Nano) wallet on my laptop, i had HDD and wallet take a lot of time to sync on HDD and at that time there not was app for hardware wallet, and most of people say that on SSD sync faster. But for other wallet i use i not have this problem on HDD, depends on what wallets you want to use. If possible check how works on both and see what option is better.

You should put the OS in the SSD, and the bulk data in the HD. In principle, you want to avoid writes to your SSD. Each write reduces its lifespan. If your wallets are light, like myetherwallet or electrum, this shouln't be a problem. But if you are downloading the blockchain because you are running full nodes, then try to use the HD.

Some people say an SSD may take years or even decades to degrade, but do you want to take chances? Also there are different technologies in use, some last longer than others. In general try to avoid writes to it, and make sure your OS isn't saving access time (atime), and that no swapfiles are stores into the SSD. The rule of thumb is: Reduce writes to the SSD.

Oh, and never defragment it. I'm not sure what did you mean by "optimization", but repeated defragmenting operations would kill its lifetime very quickly. I hope you DO pay attention to the people telling you to no use windows, that is no joke, switch to Linux for serious money handling matters.

yes, know about linux being way more secure and already studying the possibility of installing it here along with windows.
my biggest concern with it is that many of the editing programs I use (like premiere/after effects) don't run well on linux.

regarding defragging SSDs being that bad for life of it it's been debunked.
it reduces lifetime but it's so tiny it doesn't realy make a difference,if fragmentation i really high it may be worth to do it.

True, SSDs are faster at using your computer, but to save more safely on the internet, there are only a lot that provide as safe and no problems.