To speed up the restart process, run nodetool drain before stopping the dse service. This step writes the current memtables to disk. When you restart the node, the commit log is not read which speeds the restart process. If you have durable writes set to false, which is unlikely, there is no commit log and you must drain the node to prevent losing data.

To stop DataStax Enterprise (DSE) running as a stand-alone process:

From the installation location:

In the unlikely event that the cassandra-stop command fails because it cannot find the DSE Java process ID (PID), the output instructs you to find the DSE Java process ID (PID) manually. Stop the process using its PID number.