Yes, next step is most definitely to move to at least an SSD. Even lightning transactions move at a snails pace over it. 😂
I’d love to upgrade my main server machine to a 2-4TB NVME (the current 1TB is too small with all the stuff I have on it) and host the data folders there over a samba share and 10 gig networking to the node software server. 48 gig of memory on the host machine for the MyNode install if I move it over.
It would be a nice upgrade over the 10 gig of RAM it has allocated now. I didn’t realize it would be so IO-intense! It’s been quite a long time since I last ran a node. Blockchain was probably in the 200-300 GB range, then. Lightning was just invented a few months before that. Lightning is actually what made me run a node last time. I wanted to learn what these “bar tabs” were that they were building on top of the base layer. 😂