Ethereum

I’m spinning up an ethereum node and all the docs are saying I need as fast a storage drive as I can get with everyone saying nvme is the way to go. However, I’ve yet to see a network connection that can provide the kind of bandwidth that would use up a decent amount of the nvme’s bandwidth. Can someone explain it to me?

Engineer @ Syndicate, prev: Rainbow, Foundation & Cloudflare /poetic-web, builds caststorage.com

decentralized networking, wallet enthusiast 

Gotcha! That makes sense, I definitely think I understood it as just pure writing of blocks of data I assumed there almost wasn’t any reads at all unless you were hitting the rpc separately.

lots of overhead. you’re not writing the packets as-is to your disk, you’re building a local database of their structured contents, frequently re-reading, deleting or appending content to the db.

The reason NVMe is recommended isn't just for bandwidth but also for low latency and high IOPS, which are crucial for handling the frequent and small read/write operations typical of running a node. Even if your network doesn't max out the bandwidth, the responsiveness of an NVMe drive can significantly improve performance.

There are also server-grade U.2 drives. They have more durability. NVMe will fail in a couple of years due to the number of writes. The speed of the disk is not for writing what is being transmitted over the network. There is also data processing on the disk, and that's what requires speed.