If you do a full disk encryption setup while running a full Bitcoin Core node on an SSD drive, does the very demanding i/o activity while downloading+verifying the blockchain do too much wear and tear on the drive?
I would assume that SSD drives, since they don't have mechanical parts, are safer to run a full disk encryption node than an HDD, but nonetheless, what would you consider when shopping for drives?
For the drive there's no difference in I/O load whether it's gets encrypted or non-encrypted data to write to or read from. The OS does the encryption/decryption in memory, it doesn't matter for the drive what kind of data it gets to write to media or read from media.
There's more load on the CPU as it has to do the encryption and decryption, but usually it can handle it without much notice for the user. This of course depends on the CPU you have. Most modern CPUs have built-in instructions for speedy encryption and decryption.
Also what about built-in drive encryption vs software encryption like VeraCrypt or dm-crypt (which I think is what most Linux distros use by default)? I would assume there's no need to even bother with built-in encryption and you should buy one without it and just encrypt it yourself with open source software.
Some drives do internal encryption with the advantage that you can erase such a full-encrypting drive in micro- or milliseconds. Full drive erasure simply throws away the internal encryption/decryption key. After that there's only garbage on the drive when you try to read it.
Anyway I just wanted to know if full disk encryption has been tested and if it's safe for the drives, and if anything, what settings to tweak in order to make it more reliable.
My daily driver runs Ubuntu on an encrypted filesystem and it runs a full Bitcoin Core node all the time. I didn't tweak anything in particular and notice the full drive encryption (except for the tiny boot partition) only when it reboots and I have to enter the encryption/decryption passphrase.
This is an old ThinkPad laptop, nothing too fast or fancy, just reliable and easy to service.