Ssd is needed (or enough ram) due to random access of state. See my reddit post from a year ago, full sync took 25 hours: https://www.reddit.com/r/ethereum/comments/7n4v64/correcting...

There's a lot of misinformation, some originating due to genuine problems (trying to use a hdd or geth with barely working garbage collector) and misunderstandings, some from intentional lies (especially two r/bitcoin moderators - thieflar and stopanddecrypt).

An archival node goes beyond a full node and downloads data not needed for full validation.

It doesn't download them, the state history is generated from the blockchain locally. The blockchain itself is 68GB (uncompressed, decimal G)