I was curious about how fast I could download the blockchain using EC2.
A 1 TB SSD attached to an EC2 instance at AWS costs $80 / month! (That seems excessive to me. But oh well.) I started over with a 600 GB drive - only $48 a month. Anyway, a c6i.2xlarge with the SSD and the cache set to 15000 can download the whole blockchain in about 10 hours which I think is pretty fast.
Once downloaded, I also copied it to S3 - that takes about three hours using the CLI, and about 3 hours to restore. That much storage is $18 a month and could probably be a lot less if I glaciered it. Anyway, after a few days of experimenting, I destroyed the whole set up, so the cost was really quite small!
It's so great to have access to a wide variety of computers for short periods of time for hobby-level costs.
BTW, the early blockchain is a lot simpler than the later blocks in the chain. I think later blocks reference way more of the previous transactions.
Here's a graph of the download times; the vertical axis is number of blocks downloaded in that minute, and then horizontal axis is time.
The graph begs loudly to use a logarithmic (or exponential) scale but that would be less dramatic.
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