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It's a ridiculous aspect of the modern world that 16GB of storage is possible to hoover up by accident.
@simontatham 16 GB? hell, this exists, and I’m pretty sure I’ve paid more for 200 GB in mechanical storage, than they’re charging for this thing now
@bhtooefr yes, I was fairly sure more than 16GB was possible, but 16GB happens the one I just had a near-data-loss incident with!
@bhtooefr @simontatham I almost accidentally ate one of these when I had a bag of potato chips in the other hand.
@simontatham The "station wagon full of magtapes" is a thing of the past.
@jyrgenn @simontatham A full (English) Wikipedia mirror is 101 gig. That probably fits on most phones.
@RogerBW @simontatham And, I guess, all Wikipedias would fit on the free disk space of my home PC.
@jyrgenn @simontatham
The truck container full of disks was a thing for some years, and petabyte/exabyte transfers are still a niche need.
https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/aws-retires-snowmobile-truck-based-data-transfer-service/
@armb @simontatham Sure. But let's go further... the proverbial station wagon full of mag tapes was a kind of whimsy take on bandwidth limitations; I read it first in 1989 in Andrew Tanenbaum's Computer Networks, although some claim earlier sources.[1]
Today, if you were serious, you might rather think of a shipping container full of micro-SD cards.
A 40 ft container has a usable volume of a bit under 68 cubic meters, whereas a micro-sd card takes up a bit over 116 cubic millimeters, i.e. about 1e-7 cubic meters, so you can fit roughly 580 million micro-SD cards in the container. This, times the maximum capacity of 2 TB of the microSDXC standard (and they are available on the market, too) comes out at roughly 1e21 bytes, with is one Zettabyte. This is a lot. (2/5)
Of course, network bandwidth today is largely independent of distance. So let us use a somewhat realistic example — bringing the container full of micro-SD cards from New York City to Los Angeles. According to Google Maps and the wisdom of the net, that is a 41 hour drive. With, say, three drivers taking shifts, this should be done realistically in 45 hours (I guess). So that is about a Zettabyte in 162000 seconds, 7 Petabyte per second. Still a lot! (3/5)
But then we need to write the data on the cards at the source, and read it from the cards at the destination. This is where it really breaks down, as this can be parallelised only so far. The station wagon full of magtapes had the advantage that at the time, the data typically already *was* on the magtapes. Which it is today, at this scale, certainly not on micro-SD cards. So this is where the example becaomes a bit impractical. But anyway, 7 PB/s is still hard to beat! (4/5)
Maybe a more interesting route would be, say, from Shanghai to Rotterdam, for which a ship takes about 50 days. Let’s add two days at each end to deliver the container to and from the respective port, so 54 days. This is 27 times the two days cited above, still 260 TB/s. Beat that with a fiber! (5/5)