Although I never experienced loading time of more than, say, 10 seconds, I always intuitively blamed it on the storage. Imagine you have an immensely large set

Although I never experienced loading time of more than, say, 10 seconds, I always intuitively blamed it on the storage. Imagine you have an immensely large set of data, most of which is never being accessed. So probably most of your hard drives sit idle at any given time and the one with your stuff on it has to spin up before it can serve you. I may be wrong but I can't imagine a sensible alternative for serving such an extreme use case as the Wayback Machine does. I'm rather impressed that such a service exists in a usable state at all.