yorickdowne

Overview

Syncing an Ethereum node is largely reliant on latency and IOPS, I/O Per Second, of the storage. Budget SSDs will struggle to an extent, and some won't be able to sync at all. IOPS can roughly be used as proxy of / predictor for latency. Measuring latency directly is arguably better.

This document aims to snapshot some known good and known bad models.

The drive lists are ordered by interface and then by capacity and alphabetically by vendor name, not by preference. The lists are not exhaustive at all. @mwpastore linked a filterable spreadsheet in comments that has a far greater variety of drives and their characteristics. Filter it by DRAM yes, NAND Type TLC, Form Factor M.2, and desired capacity.

For size, 4TB is a very conservative choice. The smaller 2TB drive should last an Ethereum full node until at least sometime 2026, with the [pre-merge history expiry](https://hackmd.io/@hBXHLw_9Qq2va4pRt

kidd

D create table test as SELECT i as i ,random() as r, i%4 as gr from generate_series(1,100) t(i);

D select * from test;
┌───────┬──────────────────────┬───────┐
│   i   │          r           │  gr   │
│ int64 │        double        │ int64 │
├───────┼──────────────────────┼───────┤
│     1 │  0.14984029697949075 │     1 │
│     2 │  0.20274345139105418 │     2 │
│     3 │  0.07478489612107744 │     3 │