It is not about storage. It is about verification time. I
Hmm i disgree, notice that i mentioned handling and propagating blocks only for miners, because for a non-miner node there is no "rush" to download or verify a block, storage is more important.
But anyway, for a good hardware it takes about180 seconds to do all of this
- Download a 2MB block
- Empty some space if need
-Verify all transactions
-deal with the mempool and construct a brand new blocktemplate.
A non-mining node doesn't need much processing for a block, and should be able to process a block size of a few hundred MBs in no time, this is only a sub-issue for miners not all nodes.