This is absolutely not true. You can download at the stripe level (similar size as audits use). So the question is only whether the software/services chain you’re using for access all supports jumping into specific parts of a file only.
An update on my little experiment. After trying and failing to use several tools, I found something that works. But there are some pitfalls to avoid.
So what didn’t work
- As I already mentioned, s3fs won’t work within WSL
- TntDrive refused to connect to the gateway MT (I don’t fault Storj for this as it’s the only thing I’ve used that doesn’t connect to the latest version of the gateway)
- ExpanDrive seemed to work but then just started throwing read errors when trying to access part of the files.
- S3 Drive with default settings attempted to cache entire plots on a drive that didn’t have enough room
What eventually worked was using S3 drive, but making sure the caching options are turned off. This isn’t immediately clear how to do, as you just have to remove the path for the caching location. Removing the caching location prevents it from trying to cache entire plots. When adding the new plot location to Chia it did take a few seconds to find the plots, but it seems to be perfectly happy now.
EDIT: Also use read only mode for the mapping and mount to an NTFS folder instead of a drive letter to prevent windows from trying to write stuff to the read only volume and causing constant popups.
I’ll keep an eye on egress, but I might need to ignore egress from today as I think it tried to cache an entire plot, which may have generated 100GB of egress right away. I’ll keep you posted, but so far this seems very doable. Network traffic used by S3 Drive is minimal, so I don’t think there is a lot of egress traffic involved.
Please be aware that different S3 mapping tools may work completely differently. Some may always cache the entire file, others may cache relatively large chunks and may not allow you to disable that. My experience only applies to the tools I used. That said, I think this should probably work with s3fs as well as it allows you to disable caching as well.