What specs should a NUC have for staking? | ETHStaker Ethereum Validator Hardware Shopping

Transcript

we've seen some failure modes right so you asked about ram and ssd we've seen some failure modes with these knocks let's start with the ram it's just your usual pc ram so it's not server ram it will not shout at you if it fails right which means that if it fails testing that gets really cumbersome you're talking about a week of banging on the thing to figure it out right so my recommendation there is get the most boring stick of ram you can right if it says samsung or crucial on it and it's not overclocked and it doesn't have any rgbs perfect that's what you want right for the ssds mostly most everything works we've seen some issues with ones that run very hot because

these knocks are so small so if they get to 50 c 60 c celsius whatever that is in fahrenheit um they start really slowing down and they might not be able to keep up and then the other thing is like the ultra ultra budget stuff like pny whatever you know qlc dram less a hundred bucks for two terabytes that stuff might not keep up but if it's a reasonable mainstream brand and you know if google did a little and you found okay it's not going to melt on me it's going to work just fine in there i want to put out something you said you know if if something in this fails if the motherboard fails if the ram fails if these

your staking hardware is generally uh for lack of a better word disposable um now you want it to run for a long time you want it to run for a couple years but a lot of people put their heart and soul into their staking setup and they're terrified for anything to go wrong with it and kind of the thing people need to understand is your validator node is really just um something that uses your keys to do a job and as long as you have your keys you can always be down for a couple hours a couple days a week to put up a new system and keep it going so redundancy is great overkill hardware is is fine if that's what you want to do

but it's important to think about these as disposable validating tools that you can easily rebuild and keep going if you need to going back to the hardware talk specifically uh in relation to the hard drive uh york is there a reason why i would choose an ssd over over a spinning platter hey you asked it in such a way as if you know there is [Laughter] so good question particularly in in a knock where i have to choose one or the other right um the clients we're using the execution client like a geth or or a bazoo or whatever it might be the

consensus client to a lesser degree like the lighthouse the tacos of the world they have a copy of the database of the chain on the drive usually not a complete copy but a fairly large copy so you're talking 600 gig or so of data that's flashing around there and they're constantly reading and writing this because the what's known as the blockchain state changes all the time people send stuff around so you may need to make changes to the database all of which says if this was a hard drive it would have to what's known as seek move the head around 200 to 300 times per second and it literally cannot do that it can't

hard drives top out as what's known as about 100 ios per second ssds can do thousands because it's that there's no spinning parts no dry no heart no no head needs to be moved right so it it they're a lot faster with seek times and that's why we're using ssds because they're the database behind that reads and writes tiny amounts of data hundreds of times a second and the hard drives can't keep up we actually have another tier we have spinning platters we have ssd and then we have nvme which is an ssd yes it's an ssd interface right but is there a

because nvme goes it's like 5x faster is there any difference for a home validator whether they choose a two and a half inch ide ssd or a nvme ssd probably not you're just talking about really with nvme and the sata you're talking about interfaces that drives behind them an nvme drive can get a lot faster so i've got one that can sync geth in like five hours for example right where my sata takes 12 hours well how often do i think guess that doesn't matter really you know and then the the other truth as well is you can have sata ssds that are faster than nvme ssds because what's in there

also matters it's not just how fast can the bus move the data it's also how fast can the ssd itself handle the data and in the end the same thing is in there there's a controller there's some flash there might be hopefully some some ram as a cache right but if there isn't it gets slower um the more bits you cram into that flash at the same time this is way where things like a tri-layer and quad layer come in the more bits you cram in the slower the whole thing gets so yeah i long story short no either one is fine just get a reputable brand and you're

good kind of touching on what fizz was talking about before you can get you know you can be as complex or simple with these setups as as you can you know you can have redundant power supplies and and all the bells and whistles but something i want to touch on specifically with the nux is you know we we touted them as basically laptop hardware low power like low consuming power and i want to address this specifically because we get a lot of these questions with the stakers especially for new solo stakers is is that going to be enough not just today but but going forward you know two plus five years from now is this something where i'm gonna eventually uh it won't be powerful enough or or whatever the causes may be you know what

does that look like we do a magic uh eight ball screen share right quick you got one of those go shake it tell me what it says uh it says most likely okay great i love it that's the right answer most likely yes that is exactly the right answer so we expect um that current requirements will not greatly increase this we expect this one from a technological perspective but also because we know what all core devs in the ethereum foundations are the people

behind ethereum what they're thinking and what they're thinking is we are not solana we do not want 500 a thousand or whatever it is validators we wants hundreds of thousands and that means it needs to run on consumer equipment and it needs to keep running on consumer equipment and there's all kinds of technical things that are already being thought about such as you know reducing the amount of data we're actually holding and and making sure that computation isn't too complex locally and in the end that's that's the whole ethos of ethereum that anybody can run a node so i expect that will continue and the knock you by today will still

validate happily five years from now awesome yep i love hearing that and i love like jamming at home you know you don't you don't need a supercharged double redundant power supply water cooled like gaming rig like you can we can totally do this on on the nut comfortably is however true that you get additional eth if you have many rgbs on it right yep that's a great shout out you gotta have the rgbs incentive rewards i like those superfiz can i ask you a leading question so if i can if i can if i can build this on this tiny little knock right

can i just do 250 gig of ssd or 500 gig of ssd why do i even need a full copy of the chain can i just point to that in furore well it's like i think nolan might have a better did you were you in that conversation or i know thorsten was so no no is the answer um you you do need to have a full copy of both the consensus layer chain that we call eth2 and the execution layer chain that we call eth1 uh and so there is still maybe a little bit of debate about the actual size of the drive that you need if you ask me i'm gonna say you need two terabytes um other people may come up

with slightly different standards right who is a conservative number you'll be fine with one or one and a half terabytes you're you're going to end up uh if you use death you're going to end up having to compress that everything every six months or so yeah not fun which it's no big deal if you're saving money uh and you're still buying reputable hardware then that that may be okay uh but i really do prefer and feel more comfortable with two terabytes you're also probably not running 10 to 100 validators or a thousand in that case if you are just spring for the two terabyte

and i'm guessing um mojo still has a bunch of questions um regarding his um shopping spree yes so one of the questions that i have is i guess we've also kind of been going over it already but um what does each part do or mean for staking in one of these machines we've already kind of gone over what an ssd can do for these is essentially allowing you to make a copy of the beacon chain onto your onto your little machine here but what did the other parts do if you want to go over that for me and why would they be important you want to talk about the seven essential parts of the computer i think that was asking he's asking what does a cpu do what does it work

not necessarily what i mean is like in terms of like staking like what you know you you've kind of described like what an oh yeah how much do you want for for staking yeah like like what do i once should it be a terabyte of ram yeah yeah okay that's what's to talk about to get towards yes sure so um let's talk about ram the and i i thorsten can fill in with with the more technical details i'm always like a higher level kind of guy but programs like uh your consensus layer client and your execution layer client for simplicity i'm gonna let's call them nimbus and guess they run in memory uh so

the the computer doesn't access the hard drive every time it needs to to run those it they it kind of loads them in memory and they run from memory with what's called a memory footprint so that application is going to be allocated an amount of memory uh and that's what it runs with and so we know that in general most consensus and execution uh layer combos take between 8 and 16 gigs of ram uh and so that's that's kind of what we want to to leave them with you i don't think you really need more than 16 but you do need at least eight um and the while the benefits are are minimal um do you do eight i would not do eight because we've done

this in rocket pool with the rpis and they start pruning geth every one and a half months because they don't have enough ram to keep the database from growing so don't do eight you need 16 gigs of memory i don't think you need 32 um i i do run 32 just because i believe in overkill um and you'll you'll find that with me we all have our own little style and my style is usually to throw more hardware at a problem than it needs our good friend joe clappis is a minimalist he wants to run things on the absolute minimum of hardware just to just because it's a challenge for him um there's probably someone who's a rationalist no one are you a rationalist

well you have the same server right here yeah so you might find someone who who is like middle of the road but in my experience it's always better to have a little bit more than necessary um so that you don't butt your head against this like the same problem over and over so you're gonna need at least 16 gigs of memory we talked about the size of the hard drive uh the processor is actually very important we haven't really addressed that yet one of the reasons i like modern nuts is any nut any modern nook you buy is going to be able to keep up with the chains but there are some some hardware or some cpu specifics um and i don't i just kind of buy big cps i would say um anything for core and

reasonably recent is fine period if you want to throw six or eight cores at it go for it you know you don't need it but it won't hurt you um 32 gig of ram um can be useful it does two things for you one you can run any combo of client you like so if you're like i really like java i want taku and besu and i want to give him big cash that's gonna fit into 16 just but it'll definitely fit into 32 right the other reason is if you're like oh i really love geth yes i know it's a majority client but i want to run it but i don't like that it's growing by like 13 14 gig a week give it more cash which you can do with

32 gig and it'll grow slower so there's that you know and future proofing we as we have an idea what things are going to look like in a year but none of us knows the reality of it um and so buying a little uh more hardware than you need is great for future griffin uh yeah back to cpu go ahead you can have yeah i'm not going to say much about that only that um if i future-proof today and i need it in two years time in two years time i could have gotten twice that for half the price yes totally accurate yeah um that's speaking of price uh we don't want us i'm not trying to make you spend a lot of money but don't skimp either um you

should plan to fairly spend about a thousand dollars on this setup um now yes obviously if if you want to run on a pie you can get away with running the whole thing for 250 or so um but i really do encourage you if if you're a home enthusiast if you're not trying to do really cool things if you just want to make it work then plan to budget about a thousand dollars for the setup and remember we're talking i mean in the case of a rocket pool it's like fifty thousand dollars worth of ether here you know it's not eat isn't 300 anymore so it makes sense to invest

into a good setup versus china where we get the the ominous music and we talk about east going back to 300 into a thousand two wait wait wait it's back there now two years two months later we're back at 300. who knew breckenridge there you go since we had the shout out uh to joe earlier i have to say so people have been doing this on a pi 4 with 8 giga ram and an external samsung t5 specifically that one because it seems to be the only drive actually fast enough that's external and joe has been working on making this a little faster so he's got this idea where you take a pi compute module stick an nvme ssd into it um and then that gets rid of the

external and just now in pre-order is something called the rock 5b which is 16 gig of ram and as big an ssd as you want it takes regular full-size nvme ssds and and still you know the pi software on it still an arm processor um still 15 watts max i think of of of draw so for people who really love minimal that's that's that's for fun that's for fun that's right there are people who run it in production seriously um but but this is their kind of game um this isn't everyone's kind of game so if you're just trying to save money that's

not the route you want to go no it's not for saving money it's for being able to brag that your staking machine is literally powered by a banana that's what it's for there's a gadget i wanted to mention about um people buying knocks or like small factor pcs in general um if you buy the bare bone units where you have to buy the ram um separately and the the disc separately make sure you you check the compatibility with the different ram modules and like some ssd sizes won't fit in the in those small boxes right so if you if you don't know about all of those stuff um maybe create a list and send it to us

we'll check it for you make sure it fits uh correctly and it's all compatible and then i'll come back to a tall and a short version the tall version has a spot for a 2.5 inch ssd only has a slot for the nvme stick now when if you look at the specs the hardware specs for this it's going to say like the maximum ssd size is something like a terabyte but we know through tons and tons of practice that um we haven't observed a limit to existing ssd sizes in these in these devices yet there isn't one um i do want to uh you know once more say when you're choosing

ram choose boring and reliable you know you don't want as much as i giggle about rgbs to myself you don't want the gamer rgbs you don't want the overclock you don't want the xmp stuff all you're doing is you're introducing instability into your system just yeah it's one of those things where you um choose corsair or something and sort by the highest rated and just go with it because that's uh at least that's the way that i do it yeah i'm sure that works you know or people have have good success with the with the samsung sticks because they're they're boring you know they're they're they're running at the rated speed they're not trying to go fast

and that's all you need