Quote from: athanred on October 07, 2023, 07:03:19 AM

As blockchain gets bigger and bigger, people no longer can use their internal HDD or SSD, permanently attached to their machines, because many devices have 256 GB or 512 GB storage. That means, some external disks are needed, for example connected via USB.

Quote from: athanred on October 07, 2023, 07:44:51 AM

the problem is you usually don't get hardware with built-in 4 TB disk, so you need some external one.

Are you talking about laptops here? I think the main system people usually use to run full nodes is their PCs not laptops, I don't even think it is efficient to use a laptop since you can run a PC for long periods even 24/7 but not a laptop.
A PC motherboard supports multiple storage disks (SSD, M.2, SATA).

Quote from: athanred on October 07, 2023, 02:02:04 PM

I also wonder, how many times you tried to verify the chain. Because CPU speed is not much better than ten years ago.

The speed of a single core hasn't gone up for ages but we are getting CPUs with many cores that can perform computations in parallel hence significantly increasing the computation time. Full nodes like bitcoin core utilize parallelism for verification.

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And now, I made a copy of the whole chain on my 4 TB external disk, and I spend next hours on getting it reindexed, to the point where it were before latest crash. Guess what: copying the whole chain was quite fast, but verification is still ongoing, it was started on Monday this week, and I hope it will finish before next Monday, without crashing. But I restart the client regularly, and refresh my copy, to not start reindexing from 2009 again. Guess what: reindexing is much slower than refreshing my backup.

If you have enough RAM and are using bitcoin core, try increasing your dbcache. It helps with the verification process speed up.