Increasing storage options for Eth 2?

Hi there I was running GETH and a Prysm validator on my NUC with DAppNode Avanced. As I was running out of disk space I had to switch to using infura temporarily and delete geth.

I understand using infura will not be an option post merge and so need to increase my storage.

I haven’t opened it up but am 99% sure I do not have a second available ssd slot.

What are my options?

Would it be okay to use an external portable ssd plugged in with usb, and install geth on the dappnode with it pointing to the portable drive as an external mount point?

2 Likes

I am curious about this too. I have a NUC with a single 500 GB SSD and need to add storage ASAP before the merge. I’m only running the beacon chain validator and am using the 3rd party remote option for the Ethereum execution layer, since Geth eats up a lot of drive space. According to https://launchpad.ethereum.org/en/merge-readiness, validators will need to be running everything locally in order to securely process transactions occuring on the execution layer. So I’m trying to decide if I should just go with a new M.2 SSD that has 2+ TB or if I can add a decent USB 3.0 external SSD that the execution layer can use. Anyone have any tips or recommendations on which route is better? Seems like the benefit of adding an external drive is that I can leave my Prysm install alone and not have to start over. Any downsides?

I’ve been digging into this recently also and stumbled upon Geth’s freezer functionality that moves archived data to a spinning disk. Just trying to work out how to add the right drive to dappnode and use this option. Hoping this can also be used with an archive node.

Hey greg, just wanted to follow up and let you know what ended up working for me. I bought a new 2TB SSD, and a Sabrent enclosure. I set up a CloneZilla bootable USB drive, then installed the new SSD in the enclosure and connected both devices to my NUC and rebooted. Went through the CloneZilla cloning steps to copy my old 500GB drive to the new 2TB drive in the enclosure. Then when the clone was successful I swapped the SSD drives and rebooted up with no issues. This guide was super helpful - Cloning and Expanding a Intel NUC Hard Drive from 1TB to 2TB

1 Like