Topic: Cheap Node Self Hosting: Just because you CAN does not mean you SHOULD - page 2. (Read 807 times)

Most people tend to learn from their own mistakes. If somebody tells them, they think they know better.
This being said, people usually find out that pruned nodes don't worth it when they want to try out something and change the wallet.

That is part of the issue. As more RPi4 come back into stock and other embedded systems get retired I can see a lot of older slower RPi hitting the market.
Either RPi3 or the 1GB RPi4 that people bought during the shortage.
Even now you are seeing posts about people building a pruned node to fit it into a smaller drive because they don't want to spend the money for a used 1TB drive.

So telling people not to try is worth a mention.
Personally I would like to see them get rid of the pruned node option entirely. It's just not worth it.

-Dave

I don't visit this subforum a lot to be honest, so I didn't know this was a common question. Honestly, as you pointed out, with used parts and around 50 bucks of any currency you can get a decent node.

I honestly don't see it happening for anything under 50 as long as you don't have a lot of parts already.

Generally speaking though, used laptops and other used hardware will be better value than single board computers. I'm playing with the Futurebit Apollo's built-in Orange Pi 4 at the moment, with 6 ARM cores and whatnot and it feels slower than my '$50 node'.

It's worth noting I bought a 1TB SSD and 8GB of RAM which made it an excellent node, with an insane uptime due to its built-in battery.

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I had tried with a Raspberry Pi 3B in the past (when it was recent). Even though it was many years ago with smaller IBD size, with a USB HDD, it was running for weeks. At one point there was a power issue and the HDD was corrupted. Reindexing would have taken just as long again, so I had to hook up the HDD to an actual PC for reindexing and finishing IBD and then plug it back into the Raspberry Pi.
So essentially I never finished initial block download on the Pi itself. I don't think this USB power issue is brought up often enough; since it's pretty common, yet there are tons of guides, 3D printed cases and whatnot for Raspberry nodes to be used with USB HDDs.

In the Raspberry Pi 'community', it seems a long and well-known fact that they struggle with USB power.

I would put a budget of around maybe $500 USD equivalent to run a full node full time on enterprise level rack server machines. You can get refurbished to save money, it does not have to be brand new. That amount of money buys you a Xeon dual processor running faster than 2 Ghz, with at least 16 GB of RAM and another $100 for whatever hard drive space or pair of SSDs you need for the near future. 1 TB should last awhile.

The point, in general does remain the same.
You can cram a lot of stuff on under-powered slower devices with I/O and other things that can't keep up.
However, in the end you are not doing yourself any favors.

And as the blockchain gets bigger and the other apps that use it need more and more storage and everything else, you will hit sooner or later hit a wall.
Sometimes the wall is soft and padded and all you have to do is dd your older slower smaller drive to another one. Other times the entire thing gets corrupted and you have to start from scratch.

-Dave

To be fair, that instruction meant to run blockexplorer for 6 (six) different cryptocurrency network. Mempool also mention this on their installation methods.

This post reminded me of the message in the README from the mempool.space production setup:


 

As far as I understand the Raspi 4 is the first Raspi that can be easily used to set up a node. So in 2-3 years we can expect to have a very strong increase in the number of nodes when all the current Raspi 4 are sold as second hand for 20 Dollars. So for me I will just wait for that and also don't put 200-300 USD in a decent raspi node setup.

I usually try to avoid investing into hardware, since its price keeps dropping sharply just after buying. I've bought my laptop in 2017 and I've already been using your strategy: I've bought the laptop with SSD and then added a HDD to it.
My data stays on a NAS that seems to be aging pretty well. I've upgraded there not long ago an 500 GB HDD to 4TB (I feared that bigger HDD won't work there) and now that 500 GB HDD I use for the blockchain, plugged into a thingy that I can connect to on USB3. Clearly suboptimal solution, but I just didn't have the hearth yet to throw away that HDD

But you're right. My laptop's HDD is indeed silent. All I can hear (when I take my headphones off, that is) is the cooler the laptop stands on.

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I usually don't have the hearth to throw away old stuff, but this topic may be just the thing to convince me do it! I have yet to find a device I can leave running 24/7 without fearing it'll set the room on fire, but I find today's 150-200 EUR too much for a decent RasPi (board only).

I've had old server disks that make a loud KRRR KRRR sound, but I can barely hear my modern 2.5" disks.

In my experience, anything with 8 GB RAM or more will work just fine to run a full Bitcoin Core on Linux. If the hardware supports 8 GB, I assume it's modern enough to have sufficient processing power. I've used Bitcoin Core with 2 GB and HDD on an Atom netbook years ago (back then I liked to keep a backup blockchain ready), but I abandoned it because it took painfully long to update.
I'm a sucker for laptops nowadays, but unfortunately most of them can handle only one HDD. My preferred setup is adding a large HDD for data that doesn't need to be on the (smaller) SSD.

There are bunch of Rpi clones for years, some of them are RockPi, Odroid, Pine64, Banana Pi, Orange Pi and some others could be considered as alternative, for example ASUS Tinker Board.
I am sure there are other single board computers that are inspired by raspberry pi.

I'd guess that one in the list could be Orange Pi which I heard about not long ago and I don't know it it's indeed good, still, you can read some comparison here: https://versus.com/en/orange-pi-rk3399-vs-raspberry-pi-4-model-b
There may be others too, let's see what @dkbit98 meant.



Yeah, probably. I guess that I've just proven the point that old hardware is probably not worth it

Watt Raspi clones do you mean?

Some disks are creating more noise than others, but if the HDD noise is the problem, I found easy solution for that by purchasing silencing case enclosure that almost totally removed noise from my HDD.
It is made from solid metal from inside (I think copper) with combination of foam and other materials that makes drive cool and quiet.
I found this very cheap, but I guess you can easily make something similar if you like DIY projects.



I can confirm that Rpi400 has a huge heatsink that made massive cooling improvements, so you don't need to install any fans and you will have 100% silent computer.
Version with 4GB and 8GB is not slow at all, but there is option of using Rpi computing module, or some Rpi clones that are even stronger.

 

Also update the firmware of the Pi 4, there are few update which reduce the heat without sacrifice the performance.


WD Black isn't exactly average customer HDD, it's designed for best performance at high price. Besides, i find newer HDD has less noise than older ones.

Think weeks vs. days.

Not quite the same but, a RPi4 with a SSD can sync Umbrel in 3 or 4 days. That is over TOR and indexing the blockchain and the other stuff to run a lightning node.

A RPi3, not a prepacked node setup, just the bare RPi software and bitcoind with a 7200 RPM is still churning through just the IBD  after 2 1/2 weeks.
Both are behind the same router on the same cable modem so it's not bandwidth just purely a performance issue.

-Dave

I thought that this is obvious enough to not state it


Then maybe I'm wrong. The HDD I use for blockchain is more than 12 years old, it's a WD Black and it's pretty noisy.


The "painfully slow" part is indeed useful (I'd guess though that it happens in the initial sync, or when it's a couple days behind), but I was more curious if anybody had the (expectedly bad) experience with lower spec Pi (3,2,1, or even Zero).

I think given the price to performance as well as the longevity aspect, the energy efficiency of HDD vs SSD would be negligible or simply a dollar or two extra per year, maximum. The price of a HDD is ridiculously low compared to SSD of similar size. The noise produced by HDD is actually quite overstated most of the time and it is barely audible.

Regarding the cooling required for RPi4, I ran into some throttling with RPi4 during synchronization and slapped a heatsink, which more or less solved the issue. Active cooling wasn't really necessary in my case. Never really an issue with the previous revisions though (7w vs 5w). It is still painfully slow regardless.

It's a very informative post, thank you very much for it. I did intend to "cut corners" and see whether it would work (and also how badly!) with the intention to just use the (few) hardware I have at hand.
Luckily I didn't have the time for the setup, so, again, this helps me a lot.

I will also vouch for the 500GB HDD "approach" problem. Right now my setup works with an external 500GB HDD for the blockchain and I already got rid of txindex in order to make sure it doesn't suddenly stop because of the lack of space (and that hurts badly my local block explorer, obviously).

Of course, one of my problems was that I've thought late to make myself a local setup and RasPi are overly expensive for now, so I'll keep the current setup (that unfortunately doesn't run 24/7), but I still have to look for a HDD soon.


That's correct. Even more, if you have another high spec computer (with SSD), you can use that one for the initial sync and just use HDD (some temporary symlinks to SSD and copying of files will be needed though).
While a normal spec is great, I think that SSD can be seen a bit "overzealous" by those very careful with the costs.
But: SSD is silent, HDD is not. SSD is probably much more energy efficient. So one has to make his choice properly for the long run.


PS: is there any info available about how much heating a RasPi do if used as a node? I fear that anything under RasPi 4 may need active cooling too (again, noise...)

You can buy low space SSD for OS which is cheaper than buying 1TB SSD and you can split them with HDD for blockchains just to improve the syncing process.
We already have a guide here on how to split them if you want to speed up the syncing process you can check this guide "[Guide] Split Bitcoin blockchain between SSD & HDD and speed up the initial sync"