The cold storage “Glacier” class of Object Storage gets its name in opposition to “hot data”. Hot data is the type that is frequently accessed. Cold storage is accessed less frequently and does not require fast access like hot data.
Scaleway’s cold storage service Glacier is engineered on specific hardware:
SMR disks that increase storage density and overall per-drive storage capacity
motherboards manufactured internally that can power disks on/off on-demand with a SATA bus tree matrix.
This particular hardware configuration allows us to offer competitive pricing for use-cases that do not need the performance of other Object storage classes. The counterpart is that data stored on a cold storage service such as Scaleway Glacier has limitations in relation to data retrieval.