@biophil 2GB isn't bad at all that's still small enough to fit on a cheap flash drive. Some block chains are 20 times that size and run just fine like Ethereum. Storage is super cheap.

Not to mention there's a big difference between storing the whole block chain for archival purposes, and actually needing to backtrack through it regularly. The former is easily done on a mechanical drive because read/write speeds and seek times aren't really an issue. If the latter was the case it would pretty much require a RAID of SSD's to mitigate the speed issue of random seeks and the reading/writing of non sequential sectors on a drive.