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Not necessarily just as fast. I remember reading about Facebook's "cold storage" mechanism a few years ago, where for rarely accessed media they would move it to a slower but cheaper data storage. The media is still available when someone tries to access it, but there might be additional latency compared to a non-cold stored item.

I understand that's not currently what this is. I'm just saying that this could be a precursor to this. You're right that I misspoke with "cold storage." What I meant was a higher latency but lower cost storage medium (e.g. Glacier vs. S3).

No - but they could optimize it internally to keep it out of caches, deduplicate to a single server, etc.

That should probably be based on access patterns, not on mutability flags. If it's "archived", but has 1K downloads a day it should be in cache.