I have played around with alot of different coins, mostly worthless shitcoins
, but trying to have more than a few blockchains and full nodes syncing on my main pc at one time is tough and with other programs running and a bunch of Firefox tabs open and running on 8 workplaces on Linux so I needed a way to migrate some of the load over to something else.
Yes I have other pc's that I could use but I wanted something all-in-one that I could build with used parts that I already had.
My main pc specs:
Motherboard: AsrockRack EP2C612 WS dual cpu board.
Cpu's: Dual Xeon E5-2667 V3 es
Ram: 64 Gb of Gskill Trident Z 3200
SSD's: / on 256 gb intel SSD, /home on a 500 GB samsung SSD
Hard Drive: HGST 2 tb for backup on the pc and I have a NAS that I backup to also.
GPU's: Dual Sapphire RX 570 Nitro+ 8gb, currently
Power Supply: EVGA 1000 watt
OS: Ubuntu 16.04.4 64bit
So you see by my main pc's specs is no slouch.
Running six or seven or more blockchains syncing is doable but it impacts my workflow doing other things like programs, games, ect.
So I am doing something about that, and that is I built a Proxmox ZFS RAIDZ0 server out of mostly old and used parts.
What that does is let me run crypto blockchains and full nodes in VM's with zero impact on my main pc.
Can you say SWEET!!
Of course RAIDZ0 is running on the edge because if any one disc craps out the whole raid is toast, but just syncing blockchains is safe enough because there really is no irreplaceable data to be lost as long as your wallets are backed up the only thing you will lose is the time spent redoing the raid and re-downloading the blockchains.
Proxmox server specs:
Case: Rosewill RSV-L4500>>>>>>>>> only new expense, paid $109.00 for it, everything else I already had<<<<<<<<<
Motherboard: AsrockRack EP2C602-4L/D16
CPU's: Dual Xeon E5-2660 V1's
Ram: 96 GB of DDR 3 ECC running at 1866, a mix of Hynix and Samsung
Hard Drives: Twelve WD 250 GB consumer sata hard drives, all have over 38,000 hours on them. ( I paid $4.00 each for them about 8 months ago)
GPU: GTX 650 because the onboard video is crap, can be run headless but its handy to have a monitor and keyboard connected.
Power Supply: EVGA 750 G2
OS: Proxmox V 5.2-1
ZFS on root.
Normally with a hard drive instead of a SSD a lot of blockchains have issues but with those 12 hard drives in RAIDZ0 I get about four times the performance of a single 500 gb Samsung SSD.
Disc performance inside a Windows 10 VM
I did remove the front door to the server, just did not like messing with it plus I like the looks without the door better and its a little quieter and has better airflow.
This has not been a completely painless setup, I did have the /boot get corrupted a week ago and lost the whole raid but its seems to be running fine now.
So far I have just been using one VM for a couple of blockchains and installed various o.s.'s to see how they run so I am still in the testing stage.
Currently installed VM's
Syncing another blockchain in my Ubuntu 16.04.4 VM
I think I will run one Windows 10 VM for the Linux unfriendly wallets/blockchains, and one Ubuntu 16.04.4 since thats what on my main pc, a Ubuntu 14.04.5, and six or seven Lubuntu 16.04.4 and 18.04 VM's since the performance with Lubuntu using 2 cores and 4 gigs of ram is real good.
I did have to tweek the ZFS ARC config to keep ZFS from using half of the ram, changed it to a max of 8 gb.
So far I am REAL pleased with the performance of the VM's.
Oh and at idle with no vm's running it uses about 170 watts not the most efficient but it has plenty of horsepower.
Edit: With 12 250gb hard drives, yes used with alot of hours on them and they are defiantly a weak link, I have about 2.7 gigs of space but with ZFS compression turned on I actually have quite a bit more than that usable to me.
Edited the title to give a more accurate description.
Edit2: Of course you dont have to run a bunch of hard drives, you could run a few SSD's on a non server motherboard as long as you have lots of ram and a decent cpu. My setup is probably overkill but I used what I had and spent less than $110.00 out of pocket on this build.
The whole point is you can have an all-in-one setup to run ALL of your full nodes/blockchains and unload that work from your regular day to day pc or pc's.
And yes I will eventually migrate over to SSD's, I just have wanted to run Raid0 on a bunch of hard drives for years to see how the performance is and after I built the thing I realized that I could use it for this use-case.
But the most important thing to me is to have fun and learn something new.
