Hardware

BS uses memory-mapped files to achieve high performance disk I/O. This works with traditional hard disk drives (HDD) but is optimal for solid state drives (SSD). Typically when designing for HDD one must consider aspects of the physical drive in order to achieve high performance.

BS makes no attempt to optimize for HDD, as it was designed for use with SSD. As such it is highly recommended that the blockchain (at least) be stored on a SSD. The blockchain database files for mainnet consume approximately 100GB of disk space.