Hello all, I DIY’d Start9 w/ Pi 4 4 RAM, 64GB microSD, and 2TB SSD.
As a layman who has zero prior knowledge on hardware/software, I somehow managed to get Start9 running with the help of YouTube and GPT, but didn’t know there is this awesome community ready to help anytime!
My question is when I went to install Electrs, it gave me a warning of consuming ~1GB of RAM on my Pi. I am using the Pi exclusively for node running and the only thing plugged into the Pi are the SSD, internet cable and microSD, not planning to install any more services that are not essential to running the node and accessing the mempool.
Would it be safe to proceed with installing Electrs with the Pi4 4RAM hardware? As the Mempool seems to need it.
Tysm 
“Safe”, sure, your Pi is not going to explode… but 4GB of RAM is not enough to even run just Bitcoin, let alone Bitcoin + Electrs.
You’d need a solid 12GB of RAM as a minimum to run Bitcoin in 2025, not something that an old 2019-2022 video is going to be able to tell you of course.
The only source of truth when it comes to installing StartOS is our own start-to-finish DIY documentation, which VERY HEAVILY warns against two things…
-
Never rely on a USB SSD connected directly to a old RPi… it’s not safe. You will experience problems with power and you were have issues reading and writing to the disk, whether with data corruption or with the drive blocking write access.
-
Never use and old RPi4 for Bitcoin, it’s just not an option, it doesn’t work properly in 2025 and a quick search online will reveal why… the UTXO set has expanded greatly in the past few years, thanks to ordinals, stamps etc, and the entirely UTXO set doesn’t fit in 8GB RAM. You’ll see here we’re talking about 8GB, not the 4GB you have, which doesn’t even meet the minimum requirements to run StartOS.
If you want to run Bitcoin, you’ll have to consider getting your hands on modern hardware.
1 Like
Hello StuPleb, thank you for the comprehensive explanation.
To followup, point 1, yea I did some research and settled on a low power draw SATA SSD the Pi community recommended that draws ~.5A max from the USB port, RPi can supply a total of 1.2A so hopefully no power issues.
Also for startOS, how much RAM does it consume when running? I managed to run the StartOS on the RPi no problem, almost done downloading the full blockchain for node running.
I have also heard the a pruned node may also reduce strains on RAM.
I’ll keep you updated on any bottlenecks that I may encounter, and will upgrade hardware according with the help of the community.
It would take a fews months to sync the full blockchain with 8GB RAM, so unless you’re a year in, you might be mistaken about your hardware stats.
StartOS RAM use depends on what’s running, but the minimum reqs are 8GB. You’d need that much to run StartOS plus a bunch of services. You’ll need more than that to run Bitcoin and more still to run Electrs.