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."

Comments

Jet full of CDs

[YttriumOxide]

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.

This is pointless

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:This is pointless

[icebike]

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.

Common sense almost prevails

[jlf278]

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.

XKCD

[Anonymous Coward]

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

The bandwidth of a human.

[queazocotal]

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.

Re: The bandwidth of a human.

[davidbrit2]

I've got Crohn's disease, so my ping times are faster.

Re:station wagon?

[istartedi]

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.