Witness Update - Full Node coming soon? SSD installed. Syncing. 68% as of now

Hi everyone,

As I said in my previous Witness Update, I'm in the process of setting up a Full Steem Node.

Yesterday I got my NVMe SSD and it rocks! Well, kinda. For io, it's still slow, but it works.

Right now, the CPU is using between 30% to 50% of a core when syncing, and since the shared_memory.bin file is being stored in the SSD, I'm getting amazing write speeds of 300MB+ and read speeds of up to a little more than 200MB. I believe this is due to it having random reads rather than sequential read/writes.

It's slow, but it's syncing.

Here's a benchmark of the SSD I performed earlier in the day:

As usual, I'm running this in a Hyper-V container, which makes it easier to perform snapshots and restore the VM in case of hardware failure, for example.

Here's a view of the Task Manager while replaying the Steem blockchain:

Do note that the RAM usage is due to me having assigned all of the memory to the VM as with this, Ubuntu can use the RAM as a cache.

As of the time of this post, the syncing process is at 68%. It could take a day or two (even more. This is my first time I'm syncing a full node), but the important thing is that once this is completed, I'll have a full node up and running 😁

P.S. Don't worry about the SSD Endurance. I got the EVO instead of the PRO due to it having faster random read/writes. What I'm seeing right now is that it performs more reads than writes, so the SSD should live for a long time.

That's all!