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Never Underestimate the Bandwidth of a Suburban Filled With MicroSD Cards

Posted by timothy on from the eggs-in-one-basket dept.

toygeek writes "If you've been in IT long enough, you're bound to have heard the phrase 'Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon filled with backup tapes.' These days moving data has become so much easier; We've surpassed baud rates and are into Gbps fiber on the backbones, and even in some homes. So, what's the modern equivalent to this, and what does it take to make the OC fiber connections cringe? Follow along as we theoretically stuff MicroSD cards into a Chevy Suburban and see what happens, and take sneakernet to a whole new level."

4 of 208 comments (clear)

  1. This is pointless by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    The original saying was coined in a time where reading from a tape *was considerably faster* than reading over a network. Hence, transferring data via sneakernet was quicker, inclusive of the read-write times.

    Now, with multi-gigabit pipes making up the networks, data can be written, pushed, and read again, all at much higher bitrates than reading any storage medium. It's the read-write to physical medium that are the bottleneck with the sneakernet now.

    1. Re:This is pointless by icebike · · Score: 5, Informative

      Well, actually not a poor assumption, considering that TFA also indicates that much data is 398,772 3TB hard drives and, moving that much data onto or off of that many drives isn't something that even Google can do in the time period measured. They discounted read-and write times on both media types.

      (Although they make no allowance for handling). Its a fun mind game, but as usual a pointless exercise.
      The Microsd cards will cost you $855 million dollars, and probably consume the entire production of 64gb cards for a year.

      --
      Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
  2. Common sense almost prevails by jlf278 · · Score: 5, Informative

    From the article: "A MicroSD card is only .1 cubic inches, so if all things were equal you could stuff 100 64gb cards into a cubic inch of space! But, that does not seem realistic. In fact it doesn't even seem remotely possible." Perhaps that's because 1 cubic inch = 10 * 0.1 cubic inches and not 100 * 0.1 cubic inches.

  3. XKCD by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    http://what-if.xkcd.com/31/
    That is all