Well with all this debate on block size still going on I have found myself dealing with a storage problem of my own. No it has nothing to do with bigger blocks. What it does have to do with is hard drives. This is the real issue with big blocks. Where do you put all the damn hard drives?
In all seriousness the only thing these drives have to do with any blockchains is backups of any wallets and full nodes. Years ago back in the Jurassic backups weren't all that tricky. Avoiding the T-Rex while doing them is another story. Backups were easy but time consuming. Copying from 5.25" drive to 5.25" drive. Even after I got my first hard drive, an Apple II Sider 30 meg drive backups still weren't an issue. Why? Well all you could do with a hard drive were store copies of the floppies so basically it was the opposite of doing backups today. Eventually newer systems came along where you could use the hard drives for other but they didn't get any bigger for a long time. 30-40 meg was about it. They did get smaller though. Have to find my old Apple drives and take a pic one of these days. Finally in the 386 days hard drive capacities shot up first 1.2GB then 1.4GB then 9GB all within a short time. Granted the cost was around $2000.00 for a drive. Those took a lot of floppies to back up. After I hit about 200 floppies I gave in a bought my first tape drive. An old Colorado Jumbo 250meg drive that actually held about 125meg after compression. Still 10 tapes was far better than all those floppies. When that 9gig hit though that 250meg drive went the way of the floppies. 20-30 tapes a backup was too much. Not just in cost of tapes but in time. Took days to backup. I upgraded to a HP/Colorado (company got bought out by HP) PowerDat 2Gb backup drive. Again another $2000 item. I think back in those days everything new they came out for home was just priced at $2000. But hard drives got cheaper and the big ones being SCSI you could put a lot of them in a system. Luckily eBay came along and I was able to pick up several used 2-4GB tape drives. I just loaded them up with tapes and let them do their thing. Eventually those big bulky 9GB hard drives became smaller and cost less then they came out with 18, 36 and 72GB too. The cycle began again. Picked up a used tape drive and some tapes from work. 15/30GB drive. Never understood why those DLT drives even had the second number they never compressed a damn thing even with compression on. Switched my weekly backups to the DLT and kept the 2 & 4GB drives for daily backups. Eventually added even more DLT drives from 15/30 to 40/80GB drives. Then DDS drives caught up and it was back to 40 and 72GB DDS drives. Finally I got a lucky find on a factory refurbished SDLT 360 rack enclosure with 2 drives. Even with all those drives I had (I think it was over 10 drives at one point) it eventually got to the point where backups took 4 or 5 days. By this point I had multiple TB of storage. So when I built my last server I knew something else had to be done. It was time to rethink things.
That's what brings us to all these hard drives. These are actually my backup drives for my servers. Not all of them. Some are lying on my desk, some in the server, and some waiting to be bought. I did have 6 sets of drives and was doing backups ever 2 months. I didn't really like skipping that month but cost of 3 and 4TB drives was cost prohibitive to have 6 more sets of 3 drives. Recently with 8TB drives getting down in price I've started using 1 8TB and 1 4TB drive per month. The 3TB are being kept as spares for the server drives but retired from backups.
So what's the point of all this? If someone like me that just has a home setup for fun can have all this storage then people shouldn't complain about big blocks. There is enough storage in that drawer for decades of 32gig blocks. And yes they could all be hooked up at once if I really wanted to. I even have the controllers to do it. Would need an external case and psu for them though but nothing that can't be easily rigged out of an old AT case. So that's the only real issue people running nodes should be complaining about. Where to keep all the hard drives. As for me I need a bigger desk drawer.
Here's a pic from when I was first moving into the bar with the backup tapes I had back then. This was before the SDLT drives. The small black tapes are anywhere from 2GB to 40GB (purple labels). The blue ones are 72GB. The big one are the DLT tapes. Grey ones are 10/20-40/80GB the white 15/30GB.
Now for that system build update. No real progress on that. Build is on hold while the motherboard is on RMA. When things go wrong they go wrong. Go to take the package to the post office Friday and battery is dead in my truck. Got a jump starter for Christmas so I charge it up and go to jump start it on Saturday. It's so cold the hood was frozen shut. Sunday I get the hood open and the jump starter doesn't work. Now I have to send it back. Scheduled a pickup for the motherboard and it went out on Monday. Not sure how long that will take to get back.
Technology keeps going forward but it can still be a pain in the ass.