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I used old LGA775 machine for running geth node. Its mobo has older sata 3gb/s (benchmark showed that ssd bottlenecked there) and only 4gb of DDR2, with windows installed. So syncing is a real pain process, for a week or more..

Now I accidentally have another better candidate, based on LGA1366 with 6gb/s sata and 24gb of DDR3, and I am thinking of installing Debian. It will be installed on a separate drive, so whole SSD could be dedicaded for blockchain needs, with --datadir command. Even --keystore folder and binaries would sit on separate smaller ssd drive, alongside with Debian with ext4 filesystem.

But before performing that bold move, I have to decide filesystem for geth data directory, to make things work their best way right from the start. Possible candidates are:

  • FAT32 (easy to move along PCs with different OSes, or use as external HDD)
  • exFAT (dedicaded to flash-based storage, saves erase-cycles?)
  • Ext4 (native for linux, most stable and supported there)
  • ZFS (i heard that is used for enterprise storage, could be more manageable if i plan reconfigure HW, resize volumes, so on)

What to choose? Why? What tuning/parameters would you recommend? (since we all know that LevelDB stores enormous number of ~2100KB *.ldb files under chaindata directory)

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2 Answers 2

Reset to default
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I would recommend choosing between ext4 and xfs filesystems

Here is an example of Geth provisioning with some tweaks of ext4 filesystem assuming you are using a Label for the mount (you may change to UUID or device)

echo "--- Mount disk ---"
[ ! -d "/var/lib/geth" ] && /bin/mkdir /var/lib/geth/data
echo "LABEL=Ethereum /var/lib/geth/data  ext4 noatime,i_version,commit=30,inode_readahead_blks=64,errors=remount-ro 1 2" >> /etc/fstab
mount -a
chown ethereum.ethereum /var/lib/geth/data
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  • what kind of improved performance do you get with these tweaks vs a vanilla EXT4?
    – jopasserat
    Dec 28, 2020 at 17:46
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    I've run a test for the default ext4 configuration, compared it with the default XFS configuration, and found that XFS performs synchronization 10% faster. I don't believe that ext4 optimizations are able to gain the same improvement.
    – Roman Shishkin
    Jan 5, 2021 at 22:22
  • What do you think of ZFS/freebsd? it has more optimized network stack, so even ping icmp responds a bit faster from bsd host, if i compare latest freebsd and ubuntu distros for example. So maybe its more suitable for network app? but it runs zfs. what do you think, is there a point of having bsd/zfs based setup for that?
    – xakepp35
    Oct 12, 2021 at 9:40
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I ran an ETH node an an older Core i5 (2nd Gen). The main issue was running out of space, so having a volume manager was a big plus. I used debian and ext4. Never ran into I/O bottlenecks. I did run out of space though :)

So having the ability to add more disks and resize the volume across disks is a must, in my opintion.

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