Good idea. I will start with a testnet node in a VM while I‘m still looking for some good hardware for a real full node.

I've just downloaded the whole testnet blockchain. It's taken about three hours and it's only 31GB of space. I'm going to leave it running on the P4 alongside the prune BTC node and the full LTC node for the moment.  :-)

I'm glad I could help. It's all a little confusing at first, although not complicated.

Perhaps you could start running a testnet Bitcoin node. Synchronization takes much shorter, disk space is much less, and stress for the possibility of making a mistake is also reduced a lot.

Also, it's cool helping run the testnet and you can try any crazy thing you might think about. :-)