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I do wonder what will happen when storage capacity greatly greatly exceeds network capacity. That is it will only be possible and cheaper to send large amounts

by debt 8y ago

I do wonder what will happen when storage capacity greatly greatly exceeds network capacity. That is it will only be possible and cheaper to send large amounts of data by physically moving in and not using a digital network.

haimau 8y ago
That is already being done for Peta and Exabyte scale data. Check out https://aws.amazon.com/snowball/ https://aws.amazon.com/snowball/ for example.
dghughes 8y ago
I can't find it but recently (within the last week) there was an article (HN, Ars, reddit??) about a new record of about 768 Tbps (not Gbps) but real world about 650Tbsp. It used different colours/wavelengths of light, 23 or 43, and did some frequency alteration plus kept most of the overhead at the source not via repeaters. So yeah the roughly 650Tbps seems usable in such a situation.
stefanpie 8y ago
https://what-if.xkcd.com/31/ https://what-if.xkcd.com/31/
cestith 8y ago
There was a time when most people had dial-up Internet access but owned or had access to recordable CD drives and USB flash drives. Many of us had high-capacity (for the day) removable media like the ZIP-100, Zip-250, SyQuest drives, or IOMega Super120. Even with 6 or 10 Mbps DSL it was sometimes faster to take a box full of disks or pull a couple drives from a system and drive them to a friend's or colleague's place to exchange a large amount of data. Sending CDs or Zip disks via UPS or FedEx was a thing for a long time in the design and custom printing industries. Before all of that, there were floppy disks. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sneakernet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sneakernet
mmt 8y ago
As sibling commenters have alluded, this is actually already (and has always been) the case, at least for "cheaper", rather than "only possible". However, looked at another way, it has also never been and never will be true, if one defines "digital network" broadly enough to include any connection between the storage device and, say, a CPU. Sneakernet or "a station wagon full of tapes" merely increased the bandwidth of one segment of that end-to-end connection. What's usually forgotten is that it doesn't do anything about the bandwidth of, for example, the tape drive (if as many as one are freely available for long enough). In the more modern world, it can be easy to forget just how huge hard disks are, compared to how much they can transfer. A 12TB drive that can do 120MB/s would need 100k seconds (almost 28 hours) to transfer its entirety. The situation is particularly severe with "spinning rust" but SSDs seem to be headed in that direction, as densities increase faster than interface speeds (even NVMe).

by debt 8y ago

haimau 8y ago

That is already being done for Peta and Exabyte scale data. Check out https://aws.amazon.com/snowball/ https://aws.amazon.com/snowball/ for example.

dghughes 8y ago

I can't find it but recently (within the last week) there was an article (HN, Ars, reddit??) about a new record of about 768 Tbps (not Gbps) but real world about 650Tbsp. It used different colours/wavelengths of light, 23 or 43, and did some frequency alteration plus kept most of the overhead at the source not via repeaters. So yeah the roughly 650Tbps seems usable in such a situation.

stefanpie 8y ago

https://what-if.xkcd.com/31/ https://what-if.xkcd.com/31/

cestith 8y ago

There was a time when most people had dial-up Internet access but owned or had access to recordable CD drives and USB flash drives. Many of us had high-capacity (for the day) removable media like the ZIP-100, Zip-250, SyQuest drives, or IOMega Super120. Even with 6 or 10 Mbps DSL it was sometimes faster to take a box full of disks or pull a couple drives from a system and drive them to a friend's or colleague's place to exchange a large amount of data. Sending CDs or Zip disks via UPS or FedEx was a thing for a long time in the design and custom printing industries. Before all of that, there were floppy disks. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sneakernet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sneakernet

mmt 8y ago

As sibling commenters have alluded, this is actually already (and has always been) the case, at least for "cheaper", rather than "only possible". However, looked at another way, it has also never been and never will be true, if one defines "digital network" broadly enough to include any connection between the storage device and, say, a CPU. Sneakernet or "a station wagon full of tapes" merely increased the bandwidth of one segment of that end-to-end connection. What's usually forgotten is that it doesn't do anything about the bandwidth of, for example, the tape drive (if as many as one are freely available for long enough). In the more modern world, it can be easy to forget just how huge hard disks are, compared to how much they can transfer. A 12TB drive that can do 120MB/s would need 100k seconds (almost 28 hours) to transfer its entirety. The situation is particularly severe with "spinning rust" but SSDs seem to be headed in that direction, as densities increase faster than interface speeds (even NVMe).