> A copy of the entirety of Ethereum fits on a single consumer drive.
Also this is an active area of development!
The most widely used Ethereum client Geth (Go-Ethereum, because its written in Go) has 3 or 4 modes. a pruned+fast synced node absolutely fitting on any consumer drive. while its archival node with all the prior states of the blockchain (not necessary for consensus) takes 9 terabytes, and is nearly impossible to sync up with without specialized drives and computational resources.
Other clients improve on that. Erigon is also go-based but with a different data structure, it only does archival nodes and takes 2 tb. Rust based ones like Akula and Silkworm also only do archival nodes, and they take 2 tb as well. Roughly 400% improvements in performance, and the same gains are seen in how much space they take.
There is probably more room for improvement as well, such that an archival node is a viable thing to do.
An archive node stores the same data, in an information-theoretic sense, as a standard "full" node. The archive node just has all the state deltas unpacked out to disk with all intermediate states readily accessible, which is useful for specific use cases like block explorers and analytics services. You can confirm this by syncing an archive node off of a standard "full" node on an isolated network.
That 9TB (or 2TB) is only 400GB when it's stored without all of the states unpacked to disk (i.e. non-archive node).
Also this is an active area of development!
The most widely used Ethereum client Geth (Go-Ethereum, because its written in Go) has 3 or 4 modes. a pruned+fast synced node absolutely fitting on any consumer drive. while its archival node with all the prior states of the blockchain (not necessary for consensus) takes 9 terabytes, and is nearly impossible to sync up with without specialized drives and computational resources.
Other clients improve on that. Erigon is also go-based but with a different data structure, it only does archival nodes and takes 2 tb. Rust based ones like Akula and Silkworm also only do archival nodes, and they take 2 tb as well. Roughly 400% improvements in performance, and the same gains are seen in how much space they take.
There is probably more room for improvement as well, such that an archival node is a viable thing to do.