Ethereum has five execution clients and six consensus clients. Everyone has opinions about which is fastest — but almost nobody talks about what they do to your disk.
The short answer: your choice of client stack determines whether your SSD lasts four years or forty.
Every 6.4 minutes, Ethereum's consensus clients have a problem. At the boundary between epochs, they need to do expensive work — update validator balances, compute committee assignments, tick the justification/finalization machinery. While they're doing it, the network doesn't stop. Blocks keep arriving. Attesters keep committing to what they see.
What happens to validators whose client is still mid-computation when the attestation window opens? They vote for the wrong head.
Ethereum had 660 chain reorganizations in the last 30 days. That's a 0.31% reorg rate across roughly 216,000 slots — normal background noise for a live PoS network.
But here's something nobody talks about: if you ask Lighthouse how deep those reorgs were, you'll get a completely different answer than if you ask Prysm. Same event. Same block hashes. Different depth. Every single time.