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Hello everyone!

Many people have great experience in this community, I would like to know which hardware you recommend to start a Storj node.
SO? hard disc type? capacity?
I’m starting with a 2GB Raspberry Pi 4 and an old 1TB hard drive.
Any tips?

Thank you very much community!

One that consumes little power and uses CMR

0.5 - 18TB

Sounds ok, how are you going to connect the HDD to your Raspi?

make sure you disable power management on your usb, tho that would most likely be standard in a server version of linux.

and usb can in some cases be kinda unstable.

Sounds perfect to start, if the disk is not SMR. But if it’s old, it probably is a classic CMR drive.

  • Ensure your disk is formatted to ext4 and mounted statically.
  • Get rid of any Swap.
  • Remove reserved space from your disk.
  • Log things to external files.
  • Set up logrotate.

… and be patient, fostering a Node takes months before it becomes a grown up Node :blush:

I wrote a README for helping me manage nodes on my RPi4B, it’s completely specialized for how I want to manager things on my RPi, but maybe it could give you some useful tips and more details on the points I listed above:

Note: With regards to the storj.sh script managing things, use it at your own risk if you do! ^^’
I’m linking my repo mostly for the REAMDE file, you might not want the rest.

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You can check what others have :slight_smile:

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Thank you for your answers!

I bought a USB3.0 to SATA adapter + power (~6€)

I’m using Raspberry OS clean. I understand that the option is disabled ¿How can I check it? Thx

Very interesting! thank you!

Thanks!

My node is running from Sunday, since I started the node the raspberry Pi has lag, about 2-4 seconds when typing in the terminal. I could not install VPN or PiHole to have other projects on the machine. The CPU and RAM have no workload.

That’s quite a lag! The raspberry isn’t the bottleneck here, I’m not seing anyhting like this on mine.
When sshing to it, I may have a 200-300ms lag top if I’m on a modest connection, but that’s about it.

2GB RAM should be plenty for a node. Even for several nodes.
CPU may work a bit when there are lots of egress/ingress, but it’s all fine as long as the io-wait and load average stay within reasonable range.

maybe something like this…
https://www.pihome.eu/2017/10/11/raspberry-pi-system-optimisation

in regard to the lag on the Pi, check that your hdd doesn’t create it, there might be something wrong with it, i assume it’s an older drives since it’s a 1tb hdd

else basically just kill anything power management related, even on the hdd itself.
you can use hdparm to turn off power manage on the hdd also… which may also cause extensive latency…

else maybe if you are running a GUI on your OS could in theory cause latency.

are you running the OS on the same hdd as the storagenode… tho if its a new storagenode, then it shouldn’t really require much at all… so my money would be on that it’s the hdd being either damage / bad or that the hdd goes into power save mode, because of low utilization and then immediately after the storagenode will access it and it will try to spin up again… which causes the whole system to lag.

the hdd spin up usually locks the entire system tho… atleast if the OS lives on it…

first thing to try would ofc be a complete shutdown, pull the power, wait a ten count and boot everything up again, before you start chasing ghosts.

don’t really any rpi’s so not really familiar with what oddities they may throw at you.

oh and check your cables and such connection, that’s also a classic that gets many often… sometimes a cable / connection may work but barely, because it’s not fully plugged in or simply a bad cable / loose connection.
especially relevant if the old 1tb hdd had a old sata cable with it.

screemshot of my deskop but is non-viable, How can I check what is due the lag?

Do you mean you have some lag in local?

Yes, when opening the Terminal it takes 3-5 for the command to authenticate to appear, then everything appears at once, typical lag problem. In desktop mode everything is very slow, it is unusable. I enclose a screenshot of TOP, I don’t know if it can be useful. the truth is that I don’t have much idea about Linux: D Currently the node works but the raspberri is unusable.

My OS is on a 32GB SD card, the hard drive is connected by USB 3.0 to SATA.

image

i doubt your raspberry 2 is good for running gui related stuff.
else i would say the SD card might be slow, which might also cause something similar…

granted my server is 10 years old, but i have yet to find a gui that will actually run on my onboard graphics.
it’s just a lag fest, with the cursor sliding around and maybe seconds or so of delay…
if you need a graphic interface to control your system, its often best to remote access it, because then you will be mostly if not completely using the remote computer’s graphics acceleration and not the rpi…

nothing to do but start excluding possible problems, first off i would make sure the rpi is suppose to be able to do what you are asking it to, if gui, else i would check the SD card and make sure it has some half decent iops and transfer speeds…

not all SD cards are suited for hosting an OS

It’s nice device and far away from Raspberry Pi2
But I have to agree - the GUI is not needed there, except the case if you want to use it instead of desktop.