2TB or 4TB drive upgrade?

[philipma1957]

right now if you are doing a laptop with no drive. no wifi chip no blue tooth chip. no eth port.

but working usb ports .  a use a usb to eth cable no driver. cost under ten.

burn mint to a usb installed ssd 1 tb long.

load the full chain. since this is a dedicated build  you can still fit this on a 1tb ssd.

Then clone to a 2tb hdd.

Problem solved.

[Vod]

My 1TB SSD drive is running out of space and im doing some shopping. Given the ridiculous current prices for both storage and RAM, I was wondering if I should invest in 2TB or assume that due AI capex things will only get more expensive and 4TB SSD would be a good long term buy.

I recently purchased an old Dell T420 with RAID adapters for my old HP server drives.  Now I have a couple dozen free TB for less than $300USD.  I know the IHG chain has a four year refresh period and they have a lot of old unused equipment - because that is where I got my drives. 

Warning!  Indexing activity wears down SSDs fast. RAID gives you the same capacity and lets you use older equipment.  You can also download a post-index build somewhere and save the seek abuse on your shiny new hardware.

[Welsh]

For what its worth I've ran multiple cheap brands over the years, especially when not requiring the fastest speeds, which you don't realistically need for a node. Depending on the brand, you could potentially buy two for the price of one of samsungs and other top brands. So, even if it did die you'd ideally have backups of anything important anyway, and then could buy another cheapo brand and still be quids in.

In the last 10 years I've only had one hard drive fail on me and that was a sea gate 14 TB. That one dying definitely hurt as I was running it for maybe a couple of years. I've never had a SSD fail on me to date. I've also got a hard drive that's probably coming up to 15 years old and still fine. Obviously, SSD's have a limited life span just because of how they work and that's usually before most hard drives if you're doing a lot of writing. Obviously, I'm not advocating to use a hard drive here...that's just to give a bit of background on cheap brands basically being fairly resilient and then the only one to fail on me in recent years was a top brand.

This side of the pond, it does seem prices for SSDs are stupid though so it might make sense to buy a more traditional brand if there isn't much difference.

[vapourminer]

considering my game drive is a 4TB.. and its for games

so getting a 2TB dedicated nvme for actual financial security??


seems a no brainer.


i also back up my full unpruned node to several different locations and media. just because i had terrible internet for the last decade. if i lost my chain, it would be weeks to months to do IBD. so RAID 1 is my friend.

now im on startlink with LTE/4G failover now so i can now do an IBD if needed. but old habits die hard.

[NotATether]

For what its worth I've ran multiple cheap brands over the years, especially when not requiring the fastest speeds, which you don't realistically need for a node. Depending on the brand, you could potentially buy two for the price of one of samsungs and other top brands. So, even if it did die you'd ideally have backups of anything important anyway, and then could buy another cheapo brand and still be quids in.

In the last 10 years I've only had one hard drive fail on me and that was a sea gate 14 TB. That one dying definitely hurt as I was running it for maybe a couple of years. I've never had a SSD fail on me to date. I've also got a hard drive that's probably coming up to 15 years old and still fine. Obviously, SSD's have a limited life span just because of how they work and that's usually before most hard drives if you're doing a lot of writing. Obviously, I'm not advocating to use a hard drive here...that's just to give a bit of background on cheap brands basically being fairly resilient and then the only one to fail on me in recent years was a top brand.

This side of the pond, it does seem prices for SSDs are stupid though so it might make sense to buy a more traditional brand if there isn't much difference.

I wouldn't run with a cheap brand's disk, because you never know the quality controls that they are applying, or lack thereof.

Especially considering that Bitcoin Core is quite intense on the disk, if you're not running production software, it makes sense to get a sufficiently large HDD and then side-step all the SSD price inflation nonsense.

You'll end up saving money that way.

But even then, I'd still get two of those disks, and put them in RAID 1 if they're to be used for anything important.

[vapourminer]

Especially considering that Bitcoin Core is quite intense on the disk, if you're not running production software, it makes sense to get a sufficiently large HDD and then side-step all the SSD price inflation nonsense.

You'll end up saving money that way.

But even then, I'd still get two of those disks, and put them in RAID 1 if they're to be used for anything important.

raid 1 is the best for data integrity but i use single SSD for the main bitcoin rig and backup to ZFS 2 filesystem harddisks on NAS every night. next best thing i guess.

of course if the SSD gets corrupted my backup does too.

[LoyceV]

if the SSD gets corrupted my backup does too.

So it's not a backup

Have you considered creating daily snapshots instead of overwriting your old backup each day? Something like this:

For regular backups, play around with rsync --link-dest= a bit. Something like:

Code:

mkdir /path/backup/todaysdate
rsync -avh --link-dest=/path/backup/yourlastbackupdate /home/user/.bitcoin /path/backup/currentdate

This makes your backup grow maybe 6-8 GB per week, plus 12 GB for chainstate. The latter will still consume a lot of disk space if you do frequent backups, your blocks directory will grow only for the new data. And you'll leave your previous backups unchanged.

The backups on my server look like this:

Code:

2026_08_20_Thu_08.50h
2026_08_21_Fri_08.50h
2026_08_22_Sat_08.50h
2026_08_23_Sun_08.50h
2026_08_24_Mon_08.50h
2026_08_25_Tue_08.50h
2026_08_26_Wed_08.50h
2026_08_27_Thu_08.50h
2026_08_28_Fri_08.50h # after this the server was offline for a day
2026_08_30_Sun_08.50h

Most of the files are hard links, so it doesn't take much additional space. But all files that are changed are copied to the new backup directory, without changing the previous backup.

[DaveF]

Just did a test for the heck of it. 6th gen i5 *4* GB of ram 2TB ssd that is really old.
From a couple of hours of when you made this post till now. Still syncing, should be done when I get home from work. Shows 98% as of now but I have to run out the door to get to the office.

Can you check how many TB was written to that SSD? I tried this a while ago with 8 GB RAM, and it wrote several TB already due to the lack of RAM.
I must say I'm surprised this takes 8-ish days. Assuming your internet speed isn't the limiting factor: do you have one of those SSDs with bad sustained write performance? You make me want to test this again.

It's a 10 year old system with an 8 or 9 year old SSD. Was not a great performer back then. Will see what I can see about writes when I get home, more likely over the weekend.

......

Just finally remembered to check. 2.4TB written since last boot.
So figure about 2.8x the IBD size.
Not the worst since due to the lack of RAM there would be a lot of stuff coming on and off the temp.

Was kind of an interesting experiment, have done it a few times before.

But, yes you can fairly easily run a node on hardware that is a decade old even with a SSD of about the same vintage.

-Dave

[vapourminer]

if the SSD gets corrupted my backup does too.

So it's not a backup
[...]
Have you considered creating daily snapshots instead of overwriting your old backup each day? Something like this:

i back up to TrueNAS as it does snapshots so im covered there. i run it with zfs level 2 (5 drives, any 2 can die).

but you are right, backup is only as good as the source. so i make sure my backups are the rolling kinds, i can roll back numerous versions via truenas to recover from a corrupted source.

[LoyceV]

Just finally remembered to check. 2.4TB written since last boot.

That's much less than my IBD a while back, with 8 GB RAM. So maybe Bitcoin Core improved something in this area.

[philipma1957]

well I sprung for a new Mac Studio.

64gb ram
2tb ssd
M5 18-core CPU, 40‑core GPU

and backups on

https://www.acasis.com/products/acasis-80gbps-thunderbolt-5-pro-storage-system-for-ai-and-creators?variant=49530842054885 with four 4 tb ssd inside


this gear should outlast me I am 69

but will certainly last 5 plus years. I would be 74.


All of the above would cost well over 7.5k

I get a lot of promos and spent around

6k

3900 for the Mac
2100 for the 4 drive 4tb ssd extra storage.

Sold some coin at 80,500 to buy it.