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Never Underestimate the Bandwidth of a Suburban Filled With MicroSD Cards
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."
In my high-school days, we talked about a 747 full of CDs...
I think it may have something to do with growing up on an isolated island nation... there's not many useful places a station-wagon will go.
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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.
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.
http://what-if.xkcd.com/31/
That is all
Swallowing capsules containing a terabyte (about 12mm in diameter, and 15mm long of microSDs) is quite plausible.
You can easily swallow a hundred of these, and it'll come out over the next 2 days.
100TB/2 days = 600 megabytes a second.
As they point out in the article, the tremendous bandwidth achieved does not include the logistics or time required to initially copy the data onto SD cards, and then back off of the cards upon reaching the destination. Still, beats a flock of parrots trained in Morse code.
I did something similar after a conversation at work using a 53' Semi Trailer and 4TB HDDs.
Semi = 630" x 94" x 102"
HDD = 4" x 1" x 5.75"
Total HDDs = 262628
Total Storage = 1050512 TB
Bandwidth from NYC to SF = 55.58 Tbps (42 hours according to google maps)
-SaNo
Great, you've managed to transfer X terrabytes of data across state lines. I salute you.
Now... go find this list of files that I need. Also that collection of data that our servers need to process. What, that's going to take you HOW long?
Yes might be quicker to send the data from point A to point B by just shipping disks... but only for archiving purposes. If you actually need to access the data, then you still have that last mile (or 10') of having to load that data into a system or network.
Now, if you were shipping a truck load of servers, or maybe a car full of NAS devices that you could just plug into a network and be done with it... then it's not too bad. Then you can start electronically searching the data within minutes, index it, use it for your data-store, whatever.
But just a car load of disks for non-archival purposes... you're asking for a headache.
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Exactly. For most scenarios a high-bandwidth link is not that useful if the latency goes to hell.
Even for my normal internet usage, I'd rather take a 5Mb/s connection with 2ms latency (to ISP's default GW) than a 100Mb/s connection with 20ms latency.
In 3001: The Final Odyssey, Arthur C. Clarke wrote about a petabyte tablet as though it were the ultimate storage medium, something humanity finally arrived at after a millennium. In the book it was enough to store the contents of a human brain!
16,000 or so microSD cards could store a petabyte in roughly a 1-foot by 1-foot by 2-inch space, probably leaving enough room to wire them up as well. Of course, it would cost nearly a million bucks, not counting the hardware necessary to wire it up to be accessed. But, still, I find that very impressive.
(T>t && O(n)--) == sqrt(666)
Assuming 2500kg for the car, 0.0005kg per cards, $50000 for the car and $50 per card:
Not only a bandwidth of 68Tbps, but a mass of 12 metric tons (4.8 empty cars).
Also a market value of $0.96B, or the equivalent of 19,141 new cars, plus one car with a broken suspension.
A station wagon is what moms wanted to drive. Whenever somebody says "Americans want SUVs". They're wrong. The SUV is a legal hack to get around fuel economy standards. See? If we build a station wagon with a center of gravity so high that it tips over in the parking lot, it's legally defined as a truck and we don't have to meet the same standards.
Sorry to get into this, but it's one of my pet peeves. Whenever I hear, "Americans want SUVs" it just grates on my nerves. No we didn't. We wanted station wagons. Mom didn't want to tip the kids over and throw them, her, and the groceries into a ditch. Shortsighted regulators left a loophole in CAFE, and they literally drove a truck through it.
Now all these kids don't even know what a station wagon is. Sounds about right. It's the vehicle that the mom down the block had. I distinctly remember us piling in there with the neighbor kids on more than one occasion, and she smoked like a chimney. Shotgun! I get to ride up front with Mrs. Potter and yeah, it smells up here but we didn't know nothin'. We didn't wear seatbelts and... well... I know this is survivorship bias talking but... we survived!
In other words, get your damned SUV off my lawn.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
However many cubic inches it is, it's the fundamental problem with this method. The one with the really crucial data on it is bound to find its way under a seat, into an ashtray etc.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Whenever somebody says "Americans want SUVs". They're wrong.
Men don't like to drive station wagons and women like to feel invulnerable. Tipping over is a lot less likely than hitting or getting hit and women as a group are paranoid that if they don't have the biggest monster on the road, they and their children will be killed by someone else driving the biggest monster on the road who hits them.
You might argue that if nobody had SUVs then nobody would want them. But that ain't the world we live in. So it is entirely true to say that "American want SUVs" no matter how we arrived at the current state.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
"A station wagon is what moms wanted to drive. Whenever somebody says "Americans want SUVs". They're wrong. The SUV is a legal hack to get around fuel economy standards. See? If we build a station wagon with a center of gravity so high that it tips over in the parking lot, it's legally defined as a truck and we don't have to meet the same standards.
Sorry to get into this, but it's one of my pet peeves. Whenever I hear, "Americans want SUVs" it just grates on my nerves. No we didn't. We wanted station wagons. Mom didn't want to tip the kids over and throw them, her, and the groceries into a ditch. Shortsighted regulators left a loophole in CAFE, and they literally drove a truck through it.
Now all these kids don't even know what a station wagon is. Sounds about right. It's the vehicle that the mom down the block had. I distinctly remember us piling in there with the neighbor kids on more than one occasion, and she smoked like a chimney. Shotgun! I get to ride up front with Mrs. Potter and yeah, it smells up here but we didn't know nothin'. We didn't wear seatbelts and... well... I know this is survivorship bias talking but... we survived!
In other words, get your damned SUV off my lawn."
This American wants his SUV, not a station wagon.
I have an SUV instead of a station wagon. Not because I'm a mom (I'm not), and not for grocery getting, but because I live in a place with 4 real seasons and big 4x4 SUVs are handy for getting around for the 2 days it takes the DOT to clear roads after a winter storm. Besides, a car won't pull my snowmobile trailer or the boat.
That said, I don't use the SUV for daily driving. It's 17 years old and unlike the vast majority of SUVs, is muddy as often as not since it also does go off road. As a 2nd vehicle, it is great. Mine is nowhere near as big as a Suburban (2 door full size Yukon GT), and I sure as hell wouldn't want to load it up with micro SD cards; each one may be tiny, but enough to fill the thing up would have it so grossly overloaded it wouldn't be funny.
I'll try to keep my SUV off your lawn.
OSX pwns.