Tip: block downloading is ridiculously much faster on SSD

[Grinder]

I haven't timed it, but I'm using the original client on Linux. When I moved the blk*.dat files to a Kingston V300 SSD drive and symlinked them from the .bitcoin dir the download speed increased at least 10x, probably more. I assume one could get even greater increases by using ram drive, but I don't have enough memory for that.

[kjj]

Yes, a RAM drive is WAY faster even than SSD.  It works even better if you do your IBD from another machine with a RAM drive.

[K1773R]

this thread is kinda: hey i used a technology which is 100 faster than the old one and im so surprised its faster now... wtf?

tmpfs ftw

[grue]

or...
just get 0.8 and set the cache size to huge number (2048)

[Buffer Overflow]

Yes, the new levelDB in 0.8 is much faster.

[Grinder]

this thread is kinda: hey i used a technology whos 100 faster than the old one and im so surprised its faster now... wtf?

Except that I only changed a small part of the system, and switching to SSD will not improve the speed anywhere near this much for pretty much any other real world task.

[deepceleron]

Not new information, but good information.

Blockchain download disk access on my system averages about 1000 IOPS (input/output operations per second) and can spike much higher, the average desktop hard drive is limited to about 100 IOPS and laptop drives are even worse.

It goes even faster on a RAM drive....