At this point I've given up any hope.
I've tried syncing with geth --fast --cache=1024. I have ~99% synchronization and the remaining ~1% (the last 1000-2000 blocks) is taking forever.
With Parity 1.3.9 --geth I've gotten to a block ~2 420 000 with a rate 200 blocks/second (it took just a couple of hours) and after this point I'm getting 0-1 blocks/second.
What's the problem? Does it have to do with the ongoing attacks or is it the result of the previous attacks that bloated the blockchain? Or is it something else?
--fastsync?blocks that take up to ~20-60 seconds to validate due to the ~50,000 disk fetches needed to process the transaction. And from photographylife.com/nvme-vs-ssd-vs-hdd-performance,Where SSDs shine is random read/write: at 4K, SSDs in your example have 50× read speed and 82× write speed over HDDs.