Staking Rig - a few questions

[dbc23]

I found a great deal on a used laptop (on newegg) that I'm going to set up as a staking machine.  I've been wanting something that would have a built in battery backup (beyond my UPS setup) and that I could let run without worrying about a miner crashing it (or keeping it on my main computer as I've been doing).

So the questions I have:

The system comes with an i5 and 4 gigs of Ram, in everyone's experience is the 4g sufficient for running multiple staking wallets and/or master/secure nodes?

Backing up a wallet.dat allows me to import the wallet, but does this bring the blockchain with it or will I need to resync/bootstrap from day zero again for all the wallets i'm running?

Is there any advice/experience others have had with such a setup you could offer to save me some sanity?

Thanks in advance!

[btcgolong]

I found a great deal on a used laptop (on newegg) that I'm going to set up as a staking machine.  I've been wanting something that would have a built in battery backup (beyond my UPS setup) and that I could let run without worrying about a miner crashing it (or keeping it on my main computer as I've been doing).

So the questions I have:

The system comes with an i5 and 4 gigs of Ram, in everyone's experience is the 4g sufficient for running multiple staking wallets and/or master/secure nodes?

Backing up a wallet.dat allows me to import the wallet, but does this bring the blockchain with it or will I need to resync/bootstrap from day zero again for all the wallets i'm running?

Is there any advice/experience others have had with such a setup you could offer to save me some sanity?

Thanks in advance!

I'm not so sure you want to keep a laptop on all the time, in general they run hot (especially HP - I am not sure about the toughbooks, they might be able to handle being on all the time). Maybe look into a celeron (although i3/i5 should be fine) system. There was a link somewhere here (mining) to refurbished $100-$150 desktops.

Half of the HP laptops I have owned didn't make it 2 years...

4Gigs should be plenty enough for the staking you want to do.


Question: what about building a desktop yourself?

[dbc23]

I've built quite a few desktops, as well as my dedicated miner rack.  I wanted a laptop for the builtin battery redundancy and generally lower overall power consumption.  Plus it's not something I'll be tempted to cram some video cards into to get mining profits out of, so it should sit unmolested once I have it set up and running.

I've actually had a good range of laptops in the past and the Compaq/HP lines have always treated me well, not sure about a grade B refurb, but for $145 it's hard to expect less than I'll get.

I actually have some low level PCs laying around (core 2 duos) with 2-4 gigs of ram.  I'd considered setting one of them up with a UPS to accomplish the same thing, but I'm seriously skeptical of the switching failsafe on my APCs and worry that I still might get a hard reset.  Given that some of the coins I'm staking (PIVX comes to mind) that with my relatively small stake, I'm in the 2-3 week uptime range to get a consistent reward and any loss of connectivity/uptime potentially resets that.

I'd played with doing a VPS too, and even have an AWS trial account for the next 9 months but I'm just generally not a fan of the cloud, especially if it involves entrusting them with a fair amount of money worth of my crypto.

[B1tUnl0ck3r]

With your cpu it's okay but prefer a 64 bits. lift it for better airflow. 2gb is okay for gui wallet in pivx. 1gb even work perfectly with CL.

happy staking.

[Vaccinus]

i like to use those racks from amazon where you can put meterials and they cna hold 300kg without problem, they are very cheap and very solid, talking about this one https://www.amazon.co.uk/Hans-Schourup-13501045-Heavy-Shelving-5-Shelves/dp/B01N7IZXI9/ref=sr_1_13?s=industrial&ie=UTF8&qid=1497278307&sr=1-13&keywords=rack