Hardware requirements for running a full node with the official client

[Mad7Scientist2]

2TB SAS is $65 new, with some SAS drives included with the server caddy in the 50s, and 2TB SATA is $85 new. What's going on? Have high flash memory prices have caused desktop PC users to go mechanical?

[ABCbits]

2TB SAS is $65 new, with some SAS drives included with the server caddy in the 50s, and 2TB SATA is $85 new. What's going on? Have high flash memory prices have caused desktop PC users to go mechanical?

It's nothing new, the price slowly rising since last year. You can check price chart on https://pangoly.com/en/price-trends/hdd and https://pcpartpicker.com/trends/price/internal-hard-drive/. But FYI, AI company also use HDD. Do you know that some HDD company begin to add "AI" label to their HDD? For example, https://www.toshiba-storage.com/products/s300ai-surveillance-hard-drive/ add it on HDD that probably supposed to read and write CCTV recording.

[DaveF]

Way off on disk size. The chain is nearing 1TB and 2TB drive will only be good for around another couple of years.

You’re wrong there, 2TB is enough space for at least another 4-5 years. Based on block sizes over the last 3 years,   2TB will be enough until 2030/2031 at least.

Probably a bit past that. Figure a bit over 200 GB a year if every block is full. So 5 years for a TB which is 2031 but we are still under 1 TB so sometime in 2032 is more likely.

Not a big worry. At that point the AI bubble would have long popped and things should be back to normal in terms of drive pricing.

-Dave

[Cricktor]

Looking at 30d average values for blocksize here https://www.blockchain.com/explorer/charts/avg-block-size, full blocks rarely exceed these days (for the last two or three years) a size of 1.75MB. Therefore 52,560 blocks per year grow by about roughly 92GB, and the majority of blocks in the past few years were "full" by weight units upper limit of 4M.

[takuma sato]

If you have the money, I would invest in an SSD of around 4TB. While 2TB keeps you covered for the next 3-4 years, I would probably think that it's a good ROI to invest in 4TB, which will give you a lot of time, and due inflation itself, plus the current CAPEX seen in AI, I would argue that the current prices are maybe actually cheap compared to future prices. By 2030 when your 2TB drive no longer is able to run your full node, 4TB prices may be a lot higher. Same goes for RAM. Of course, SK Hynix and Samsung may come up with some great solutions, or the AI CAPEX may reach a bubble status and we'll see another cyclical correction, but I would at least guarantee a good number of years of running a full node smoothly because having to resync from scratch everytime you run out of space is annoying, thus try to get a future proof setup.

[DaveF]

If you have the money, I would invest in an SSD of around 4TB. While 2TB keeps you covered for the next 3-4 years, I would probably think that it's a good ROI to invest in 4TB, which will give you a lot of time, and due inflation itself, plus the current CAPEX seen in AI, I would argue that the current prices are maybe actually cheap compared to future prices. By 2030 when your 2TB drive no longer is able to run your full node, 4TB prices may be a lot higher. Same goes for RAM. Of course, SK Hynix and Samsung may come up with some great solutions, or the AI CAPEX may reach a bubble status and we'll see another cyclical correction, but I would at least guarantee a good number of years of running a full node smoothly because having to resync from scratch everytime you run out of space is annoying, thus try to get a future proof setup.

Nah,
1) It's not going to be 2030 probably 2032 or beyond.

2) Even if an AI bubble does not pop or AI investment does not slow down, just the progress of things is going to bring drive prices down. There are fabs being specked / built that are going to take some pressue off.

3) You don't have to resync as you run out of space and upgrade you just need to migrate the data to a new drive. I even do that at times when setting up new nodes so I don't have to wait a day or two for the IBD to finish.

-Dave

[Cricktor]

By 2030 when your 2TB drive no longer is able to run your full node, 4TB prices may be a lot higher.

I call out "Nonsense!" for the first part of your sentence. Currently 1TB doesn't quite fit anymore, because even a small OS needs some space, too. Do the math yourself with the educated guess of a yearly growth of around 100GiB, as I wrote before, for the Bitcoin blockchain data. Let's talk again in 2033 or 2034, shall we?

[gmaxwell]

you can drop the storage requirement by a significant amount using a filesystem with compression for the blocks...  the node software could drop it quite a bit more with a relatively small change to use a compressed serialization -- patches have even been posted. But no one actually cares about this storage requirement except forum whiners, particularly since if you don't want to store so much you can simply prune.

[ABCbits]

you can drop the storage requirement by a significant amount using a filesystem with compression for the blocks...

While i also mentioned it few times as workaround, what filesystem would you recommend? On linux. both btrfs and OpenZFS require you to enable CoW if you also want to use compression, but last time i tried, the disk performance is poor without additional tuning that i don't understand. I never tried F2FS though.

[DaveF]

you can drop the storage requirement by a significant amount using a filesystem with compression for the blocks...  the node software could drop it quite a bit more with a relatively small change to use a compressed serialization -- patches have even been posted. But no one actually cares about this storage requirement except forum whiners, particularly since if you don't want to store so much you can simply prune.

Agreed.
Not to mention with both Windows and linux you can extend drives across multiple disks so it's not even that hard to just add in a few hundred gigs from whatever drive you happen to have around so long as it fits in your case.

https://www.diskinternals.com/glossary/spanned_volumes/
https://forums.rockylinux.org/t/partitioning-hand-holding-needed/4998/4

Anyone commenting about drive / storage space is just someone with an agenda at this point. Not sure what the agenda is but it's been pointed out too many times that it's not a big deal for them to still be harping about it without some other reason.

I have posted about a few times a 10+ year old PC with limited RAM and a 1TB drive that it's only value is $0.20 / lb at the scrap yard can still run a full node.
Anything more you need a bit more storage but adding another small drive to expand storage or just getting a larger one is not that big a deal.

-Dave

[DaveF]

Side note to all of this:

https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/hdds/toshiba-to-double-hdd-production-capacity-as-30tb-class-loom-65tb-100tb-drives-on-the-roadmap-for-2030-and-beyond

So larger spinning drives might have some downward price pressure coming.

Don't know if it will help with pricing on other things but it might. We can hope.

-Dave

[ABCbits]

2. 7 gigabytes of free disk space
3. 2 gigabytes of memory (RAM)

I suggest you don't copy totally outdated data and post it mostly unreflected and without any experience here. And why don't you provide a proper source link of what you copied? (Nevermind, I don't care much what's written on bitcoin.org.)

Ignore that account. It's just another account that spread false information on this board. And here's the source link, in case anyone care about what's written https://bitcoin.org/en/full-node.

I would recommend at least 8GB RAM. 4GB might still work with a minimal Linux and no GUI, but 8GB or even better 16GB are more comfortable.

When the free RAM capacity cannot store full UTXO (the peak was at 12.8GB according to https://statoshi.info/d/000000009/unspent-transaction-output-set), i also recommend to use SSD (at least to store chainstate folder) to avoid extremely long sync time.

Side note to all of this:

https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/hdds/toshiba-to-double-hdd-production-capacity-as-30tb-class-loom-65tb-100tb-drives-on-the-roadmap-for-2030-and-beyond

So larger spinning drives might have some downward price pressure coming.

Don't know if it will help with pricing on other things but it might. We can hope.

-Dave

It makes me wonder if they plan to stop producing smaller HDD capacity, which may be purchased by individual like us.

[Cricktor]

...

I should've ignored it, especially after I saw your trust feedback, and rather had it reported, which someone else apparently did, as the post and my response were both deleted.

I agree and due to current high SSD prices a smart choice is in my opinion to use e.g. a smaller SSD, if that is what you already have, for everything except the block files and put blockchain data files on a HDD of your choice with at least 2TB size, e.g. via blocksdir=/mnt/spinning-rust when your HDD is mounted to /mnt/spinning-rust folder. Block files will then be in /mnt/spinning-rust/blocks folder.

That way one can use e.g. a 250 or 500GB SSD for OS and Bitcoin node (wallets, indices, UTXO set in chainstate folder and benefit from speed of the SSD and have the currently roughly 822GiB of block files on the HDD where its limited I/O performance doesn't hurt so much, assuming the node isn't bombarded with a lot of queries.

I will do this likely soon with one of my nodes where I moved the block files temporarily on an extra 1TB SATA SSD which will fill up in the not so distant future. The node was formerly running under Ubuntu on a 1TB SATA which ran out of space and I had to move off the block files to continue to use the system.

Code:

Filesystem                1K-blocks      Used Available Use% Mounted on
/dev/sdb1                 960302096 861312392  89205712  91% /mnt/ssdplus

This will last likely another 11ish months or so. I'll replace the 1TB Sandisk SSD Plus with something like a 2.5inch HDD of at least 4TB size or so.

[Mia Chloe]

Way off on disk size. The chain is nearing 1TB and 2TB drive will only be good for around another couple of years. For best IBD speed a ssd is preferred vs a spinner as it can literally shave days off of the initial block download time..
For the rest, even an I5 or AMD equivalent cpu with 16GB of DDR3 ram will do fine tho 24 or 32GB ram would be ideal along with using 2x at least 2TB drives in RAID1.

It also should go without saying that the computer running the node should be used ONLY as a node. To minimize any attack vectors no browsing, streaming, etc

Running with the best specs you can get is usually a better choice anyways I've been thinking about something interesting but I haven't tried it though. How safe exactly would it be to run the entire node on a San disk probably. 4 TB one without getting the drive corrupted especially if you decide to unplug it.

Most times node runners have to set aside a particular computer for Thier nodes only so I'm thinking how easy it would be to have a drive that when I pop on the system becomes a node and when you pop it off it's back to a regular PC.