Mailing Disks is Faster than Uploading Data

CowboyRobot writes "Who would ever, in this time of the greatest interconnectivity in human history, go back to shipping bytes around via snail mail as a preferred means of data transfer? Jim Gray would do it, that's who. And we're not just talking about Zip disks, no sir. We're talking about shipping entire hard drives, or even complete computer systems, packed full of disks. David Patterson (one of the developers of both RISC and RAID) interviews ACM Turing Award winner Jim Gray." Back in school we always had a saying, "Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon filled with backup tapes." Seems like that still holds true.

Comments

Netflix

[geekee]

Netflix has made a business out of shipping data via snail mail, since the bandwidth isn't really there yet to do it over the internet.

Well, depends on what way you look at it.

[gotr00t]

Though it is true that a box filled with hard disks that is snail mailed has a higher rate of transfer than actually uploading the contents of all those hard disks, there are problems with this argument as well.

First of all, when downloading, you have the benefit of instantly recieving the file that you need, as opposed to waiting at least a day for your shipment to arrive.

Secondly, remember that bandwidth is probably cheaper than postage. Shipping a carton with a few hard disks and proper insulation would cost at least $30 to overnight it.

Really, the title of the article comes upon the conclusion way too quickily. You must consider much bandwidth the sender and the reciever have. If both have a several gigabit OC line, then perhaps uploading it would be faster.

Re:Well, depends on what way you look at it.

[tarius8105]

First of all, when downloading, you have the benefit of instantly recieving the file that you need, as opposed to waiting at least a day for your shipment to arrive.

The average home user still uses a 56k modem, I dont see how it would be faster to transfer a gig on a 56k then priority overnight (much less then 160 gigs).

Secondly, remember that bandwidth is probably cheaper than postage. Shipping a carton with a few hard disks and proper insulation would cost at least $30 to overnight it.

Depends on how you ship and what you ship and the connection the person has.

Really, the title of the article comes upon the conclusion way too quickily. You must consider much bandwidth the sender and the reciever have. If both have a several gigabit OC line, then perhaps uploading it would be faster.

Not all companies can afford an OC line thus shipping would be cheaper.

I don't know

[desenz]

The figures, but does the cost of the bandwidth exceed the price of gas?

Eh. Guess it doesn't matter anyway. Its still cooler to be seen driving down the street w/ lots of tapes.

Re:SneakerNet

[Anonymous Coward]

I used to work at an IBM site that was used for offsite back-up by major companies. They have these really cool 38 ton trucks that come into the loading bays, where they just connect up a couple of cables and pump the data off the trucks and into the building.

Basicly they shunt data around, the same way Exxon et al move oil.

Usenet used to work this way ....

[taniwha]

uucp to Australia used to be done by uploading a spool dir somewhere in the US to a tape and airfraighting it to Oz, then doing the same at the other end. You'd post something to usenet and get a reply 2 weeks later

Shipping Laptops

[zymurgyboy]

I work in a AmLaw top 100 law firm in DC. We do a lot of complex litigation work. We use software such as Concordance, Ringtail, and Litgator's Notebook (runs on Lotus Notes) to manage collections of documents. The documents are scanned to group IV tiff; the meta data and OCR text that is extracted from the documents at scan time is loaded into another database that overlays the images.

These tiff file collections run into the millions.

Of course the point of doing this is to facilitate collaboration on document review between us, our clients and our co-counsel. These people are often 1000s of miles apart, and nearly as often have crap for IT resources (equipment and personnel).

There are ways of accessing this stuff over the internet securely but it's never quite the same as having the real version of the software. This form of access often proves to be impractical for the lawyers who travel alot depending on the type of access they can get wherever they end up.

So what often happens is, we end up dumping the entire collection on a laptop with a big hard drive or a bigger firewire or USB drive, so they can work without access to the internet and then replicate changes when they can get the laptop back on ethernet or a POTS line.

Collections of images and databases (not to mention the various Power Point presentations and word processing files) can very easily run over 50GB. Moving this across the LAN, over my PC BUS to another hard drive and then FEDEXing it is certainly faster than doing the same transfer using FTP or SCP. Not to mention, that way I can install the software (properly) and test the whole setup before I send it off. The extra wear and tear I save on my psyche from NOT having to explain how to install all of the software, point it to the image collections, and deal with equipment I have no control over while being screamed at by extreme Type A attorneys going to trial makes that laptop look like a pretty good investment.

These are good if you have someone on the other end of your FEDEX run who know how to open the case on a PC and install a HD themselves. I can setup one machine with everything, image the hard drive, make copies on other drives and drop them into FEDEX pouches as fast as I can make 'em. I can't think of a faster way to move a few 100 GBs of stuff to a half dozen places inside of a day. If someone has ideas, I'm all ears.