old (platter) hard drives do degrade and slow down. you can normally tell because you can hear the bearings in the spindle of the platters or the actuator arms of the 'head' (reader/writer) get more clunky/noisy

when hard drives get full you hear it the most. because they have to search data across many different  sectors(locations on the platters)


you are correct there is no physics NEED to be full node just to make a transaction and use bitcoin.
however it needs to made clear the different features that can be opted in or out of being used . and knowing the differences.. rather than some that just pretend pruning =full where they want everyone to prune to cause centralisation.

there is nothing wrong with choice.. but having informed choice is what should be done

trying to get core to have prune mode set by default. is not really a good thing. yes give the option to use prune. but not try to push to make it the default, where then majority of nodes would then  be pruning thus not having a distributed blockchain

i laugh when i see the same dozen people recite the same outdated, debunked scripts that try to push for:
high tx fee's as being ok/normal/to be expected "just pay more"
less utility on bitcoin via pushing users to use altnets.
trying to say bitcoin is unfit due to 1990-2007 tech.

and all doing so just to promote their altnet as the bitcoin 2.0

Just to avoid confusion: a pruned node is a full node.

Pruning is full with the exception that you dump blocks later on. Full doesn't stand for full blockchain, but for full features; so no centralization. There will always be nodes willing to store the entire chain (mainly merchants), so we won't ever be left without it.

From a quick search:

Which site says that full node requires store of the entire chain?

Numbers 1 and 4 (for me) on Google:

current blocks are about 1.4mb and there are 52,500 blocks a year average. so ~74gb a year =740gb a decade
meaning yea a 1tb could do that job based on current stats..

however should devs finally remove the cludgy bad math miscount code
it could easily become 4mb blocks of proper legacy utility meaning ~210gb a year which is if you want a PC to last 4+years, fine. but 10 years presuming they will finally shift the goal post by removing the cludgy math code legacy limit within the next decade, its to be a 2.5TB+ hard drive

there is not much difference between a 1tb vs 4tb in price its not like the price is 4x. so better off on the long run to have a 4TB hard drive

at the moment there is a hard limit of 4mb.
there is a cludgy limit that keeps data throttled down at about a 1.4mb average, keeping tx count allowance low

there are also rules for ~105,000 blocks in 2 years

so simple math 105k blocks times 1.4 =~150gb for 2 year (650gb total)
or upto 420gb a year using the uncludgy max 4mb rule (920gb total)

chances of devs suddenly raising the 4mb block limit above 4mb is pfft. seems like something not on their roadmap this year or next. so presume we are stuck with the restraints of the 4mb limit. where they "may" remove the cludge to atleast get to 4mb of data per block instead of throttled down at a average of 1.4mb.

and most would prefer the cludgy limit to be taken away to then actually allow more utility of the 4mb for actual tx count increase anyway
and progress from there in a few years after that

so for 2 years guess around the 650gb total for full archival at current rate-920gb for full archival if cludgy code removed to full utilise 4mb block limit

The NVMe is very fast, but won't be able to use that performance if it's connected through USB. NVMe is slightly more expensive than SSD, and you won't use that speed at all in the many years you're using it after the IBD (initial block download).
So here's what I would do: can you replace the storage inside your laptop for a bigger one? If your laptop uses an HDD now, it will become much more responsive if you replace it for a (sufficiently large) SSD. And fit your old HDD in a USB case for other uses. You'll need to clone or reinstall your OS if you do that.

So replace the HDD It's the best upgrade you can do for old computers (and adding RAM helps too of course). Any chance your laptop has a build-in DVD player? If so, you can fit more storage in it's place.

You won't need more than that for downloading the blockchain. Chances are your current hard drive reads much less than that, but more importantly, the access time of a HDD is much, much worse than SSD.

I wouldn't plan 10 years ahead for an old laptop In my experience, I tend to fill up all storage no matter how much space I have.

More miners lead to a higher difficulty, not more blocks. I see no reason for the blockchain to grow more than ~100GB per year in the coming years.

This is all true, I just wanted to clarify to the OP that he does not really need the additional disk space if he can't afford it. To me it seemed like he was a little bit skeptical if it is worth it to invest into a new hard drive, and if you hesitate to buy a 20 USD hard drive than you should probably use your money elsewhere than to support the bitcoin network with a node.

theoretically, i read you can transfer up to 2GB/sec through usb via nvme. so it's not exactly slow. but yeah you have to have usb 3.2.


that statement makes no sense. unless by SSD you mean "SATA SSD" but even then you're completely wrong. You can get 2TB NVMe SSDs for the same price you get ones in the SATA form factor. external SSDs if anything seem to be at a price premium to every other form factor so what you're doing is paying for the novelty and convenience of portability but nothing more.


yeah but if you go by TBW rating, your computer will be obselete before any of that becomes an issue.

far longer? any data to back that up?

This is the simplest answer because you can save money and it guarantees you to use it for a long time because in the future hard disks will become cheap and when you need more space, you can buy them later. This is expected since there will be more users in the upcoming days and transactions are mostly multiplied and Bitcoin Core's data will also expand. This is also a good thing because the more people will come, the more we are guaranteed to last longer because there will be more liquidation, and bitcoins as assets will be more recognized in the future.