Topic: RAM drive or SSD to hold blockchain. - page 2. (Read 3264 times)

seriously? 128GB RAM

my Desktop system :
Intel Skylake Core i7 6700K 4.0GHz 8MB 1151p
Asus H110M-C DDR4 2133MHz VGA 1151p
Kingston Hyperx S 16GB (2x8) 3000MHz DDR4 HX430C15SB2K2/16
testining on Ubuntu 16.10 dd command.

test units
Seagate Barracuda 3.5 1TB 7200Rpm 64Mb Sata 3 ST1000DM003
Kingston 240GB V300 SSD Disk SV300S37A/240G
and
my ram disk : 8GB

all file systems ext4 (-i 4096MB)

my ram disk setup :
mkdir /ram
mount -t tmpfs -o size=8192M tmpfs /ram


my ram drive write speed :

root@kutaypc:/ram#  dd if=/dev/zero of=./largefile bs=1M count=1024
1024+0 kayıt girdi
1024+0 kayıt çıktı
1073741824 bytes (1,1 GB, 1,0 GiB) copied, 0,326958 s, 3,3 GB/s


my SSD drive write speed :

root@kutaypc:/home#  dd if=/dev/zero of=./largefile bs=1M count=1024
1024+0 kayıt girdi
1024+0 kayıt çıktı
1073741824 bytes (1,1 GB, 1,0 GiB) copied, 0,577785 s, 1,9 GB/s

my HDD drive write speed :

root@kutaypc:/disk2#  dd if=/dev/zero of=./largefile bs=1M count=1024
1024+0 kayıt girdi
1024+0 kayıt çıktı
1073741824 bytes (1,1 GB, 1,0 GiB) copied, 4,60376 s, 233 MB/s


WRITE test results : RAM > SSD > HDD

root@kutaypc:#sh -c "sync && echo 3 > /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches"


my ram drive read speed :
root@kutaypc:/ram# dd if=./largefile of=/dev/null bs=4k
262144+0 kayıt girdi
262144+0 kayıt çıktı
1073741824 bytes (1,1 GB, 1,0 GiB) copied, 0,20474 s, 5,2 GB/s

my SSD drive read speed :
root@kutaypc:/home# dd if=./largefile of=/dev/null bs=4k
262144+0 kayıt girdi
262144+0 kayıt çıktı
1073741824 bytes (1,1 GB, 1,0 GiB) copied, 2,21521 s, 485 MB/s

my HDD drive read speed :
root@kutaypc:/disk2# dd if=./largefile of=/dev/null bs=4k
262144+0 kayıt girdi
262144+0 kayıt çıktı
1073741824 bytes (1,1 GB, 1,0 GiB) copied, 9,81372 s, 109 MB/s

READ test results : RAM > SSD > HDD

Probably on a server, RAM is pretty cheap atm.

Are you guys talking about 128 GB of RAM  i am using 16 GB of RAM which i thought is superior  SSD is faster than any mechanical drives but be careful about power outrages when you are using SSD

I have my wallet on an old(2005) Toshiba laptop with 256mb RAM and originally 20gb hard drive
bought a very cheap SSD 128 gb for 78$ and now I have a hardware wallet that I only use for storing bitcoins
I connect it to internet once in a while to sync and only use it to check on my precious coins,nothing else

Yep, SSD is sufficient, especially if you get something that isn't impeded by SATA 3 speeds (~550MB/s), or the AHCI software interface. Most 2016 era BIOS'es support NVME and booting from PCI express SSDs. But even something older will benefit from SSD performance.

For the workloads you mentioned, I've been using SSDs for the longest time, I can't actually remember whether I ever tried it with mechanical disks. All I know is that it would mean far too much waiting around, 15 minutes to rescan wallets sounds tortuous. Ramdisk would probably only be practical or cost-effective for miners; you might have a spare PC with 128GB RAM today, but the blockchain can expand anything up to ~ 5 GB per month.

Well a RAM drive would make shutting down the computer a major pain since the entire blockchain would have to be dumped to the disk, unless you want to resync the whole thing every time you start the computers.

An SSD is usually enough. I think one of the bigger bottlenecks is in the CPU.

Serious Question, for those using Bitcoin Core or anything similar that stores the blockchain.

Aside from the very fast speeds, any other advantage to storing the entire blockchain in a RAM drive? I mean, if I have 96 GB of RAM, or 128 GB ...

Or are SSDs "more than enough" ? Can get a 128 GB or 256 / 240 GB SSD just to store the blockchain.

Use case: loading and rescanning different wallets. As in different wallet.dat files. So of course I'm not using pruning mode, I'm keeping the whole chain. If I had the RAM, yeah, it would be so much faster. SSDs, still faster than any mechanical HDD. I just don't know if anyone has tried it yet (maybe the big companies out there have tried it.)

Currently I'm using a slow hard drive, and when I rescan my wallet (which has addresses as far back as 2013) it takes at least 15 minutes before the GUI shows up. If I rescan a newer wallet (with addresses generated in 2016), it still takes about 5 minutes.

Maybe this would be just a "Waste" of RAM. It's just that I am finding a lot of older hardware selling for cheap, with DDR3 or even DDR2 RAM, those are still faster than SSDs.