I setup a new #bitcoin v27.1 node yesterday. It's a pretty powerful machine - Xeon with 64gb of ddr4 ram, but it's HDD only. The issue is that IDB loads the disk to 99-100%, and the machine startes lagging hard so much so that bitcoind itself loses most or all connections to its peers. This cases waves of bursts and pauses. I believe I haven't seen such behaviour before even on RPi3. If anyone synced a node lately with an HDD machine, please share your experience.