5 ms·
Ahh, the old old old saying, "Never underestimate the bandwidth of a stationwagon full of tapes" still holds true.
by gHosts 8y ago
Ahh, the old old old saying, "Never underestimate the bandwidth of a stationwagon full of tapes" still holds true.
- samschooler 8y agoThis actually seems like a fun math calculation... Has anyone done this before?
- jmpman 8y agoIf I remember right, it was a problem in Tanenbaum’s book.
- simonebrunozzi 8y agoCorrect.
- scrooched_moose 8y agoXKCD What If #31 is a good one. https://what-if.xkcd.com/31/ https://what-if.xkcd.com/31/
- zaarn 8y agoSince we have 512GB µSDs the milk bottle would go from 1.6PB to 12.8PB, all other results need to be multiplied by the 8 times increase in storage density...
- penagwin 8y agoCould easily stack dozens of milk bottles in most SUVs/Trucks. I have a new business venture guys!
- zaarn 8y agoNot really a new business venture, sneakernets have existed for a long time. On Cube having someone check by your house with a few terabytes of internet to copy to your disk is a thing. And companies regularly have interns carry harddrives between servers or even have someone drive it between cities because it's simply cheaper to pay for gas and driver than to pay the transfer over wire. And usually faster too.
- gamegoblin 8y agoYou could easily fit 10PB in the back of a pickup truck (a thousand 10TB hard drives). San Francisco to NYC is a 4 day drive at 12 hours a day. So that’s 10PB/4 days = 231 Gbps Not bad!
- klodolph 8y agoI would expect ~2,000 tapes in the back of a pickup, at 6TB each. Note that: - Tapes are easier to stack and load in boxes - Tapes are are more resistant to shock and damage from vibrations - Tapes are generally more resistant to damage from the environment - Tapes weigh less than hard drives (this is true whether measured per tape or per byte)
- derekp7 8y agoDon't forget to include the time it takes to write to and read from the tapes (or HDDs)
- woliveirajr 8y agoBut if you transmit the same data using networks, you also need to read / write from the tape/hdd/whatever, unless you're talking about RAM-to-RAM speed. IMHO you should just account for the time to mount/connect the HDDs to the computer.
- mbreese 8y agoAnd you could read/write transported HDDs or tape in parallel. If you’re transmitting over the internet, it’s much more difficult to have parallel transmission paths.
- mmt 8y agoHDDs, yes, but tapes, no. That is, HDDs are generally unbounded in the parallelism because disk bays are cheap [1] and plentiful. OTOH, tape drives are expensive, multiple thousands of dollars, which makes them scarce. [1] $100/bay in quantity, but, in some cases, effectively $0 if counting unused bays in existing servers.
- dingaling 8y agoPendantically it's a trick question; the bandwidth of a tape is 0 MHz.
- moonbug 8y agoYeah, Amazon. It's their Snowball product
- reaperducer 8y agoYeah, but the latency is a killer. I haven’t thought about SneakerNet since the late 80’s floppy disk days.
- rosege 8y agoIt probably will hold true for a long time due to increasing media densities
- mhandley 8y agoThe problem is you don't care about the fastest link on a path - the bottleneck link bandwidth is what matters. The stationwagon isn't the bottleneck; the tape drive is.
- rout39574 8y agoStreaming, tape compares favorably with HDD TFA suggested twice the speed?. Random access, of course, tape blows. :P So really, the bottleneck is _mounting_ the tape.