[Ethereum] What are the Ethereum disk space needs

blockchaindisk-spacestate-trie-pruningstatistics

How fast is Ethereum blockchain growing and how big is it likely to get in the future? Is it still about 1 GB per month? Are there any data pruning or compression algorithms in place or planned to be used?

Best Answer

Update on Dec 9th, 2018 / Block ~ 6_850_000 - It's quite an annoyance to keep this answer updated.

Geth (Go)

Last Update: May 14th, 2018 / Block ~ 5_600_000

Client / Mode         | Block Number   | Disk Space
======================|================|===========
geth light            | 5_600_000      | 363M
geth fast full        | 5_600_000      | 142G
geth full full        | ?_???_??? [1]  | 239G + [1]
geth full archive     | 4_980_000 [2]  | 671G
  • [1] My disk was full, I didn't expect this to run out of space and wasn't able to repeat this sync mode
  • [2] I didn't manage to sync the archive node within six weeks, unfortunately fully.
  • Geth 1.8.3
  • Ubuntu 16.4 LTS, VPS instance with SSD backed storage

Parity (Rust)

Last Update: May 14th, 2018 / Block ~ 5_600_000

Client / Mode         | Block Number   | Disk Space
======================|================|===========
parity light          | 5_600_000      |  89M
parity warp fast      | 5_600_000      |  82G
parity full fast      | 5_600_000      |  78G
parity full archive   | 5_600_000      | 1.1T
  • Parity 1.10.0
  • Ubuntu 16.4 LTS, VPS instance with SSD backed storage

Update: Nov 29th, 2017. Afri has written a blog post about this, esp. parity pruning modes: The Ethereum-blockchain size will not exceed 1TB anytime soon.

Some Sheet.