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Data Storage The Internet

Mailing Disks is Faster than Uploading Data 581

Posted by CowboyNeal from the data-access-versus-data-excess dept.
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.
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Mailing Disks is Faster than Uploading Data More

Mailing Disks is Faster than Uploading Data

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  • Does a station wagon drive itself? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by irritating environme ( 529534 ) on Thursday July 10, 2003 @08:36PM (#6411395)
    Kick off transfer, go to sleep. If it takes three more hours, who cares? You aren't burning wet cycles yourself.

    And, befitting my moniker, it's better for the environment.

  • Classic exam question. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Jason1729 ( 561790 ) on Thursday July 10, 2003 @08:39PM (#6411406)
    On our Distributed Systems final, we had a question about using an airplane full of CDs being used to replace our school's internet connection. The point was the even though the plane offered 10,000 times more bandwitdh, the 80 minute latency meant it wasn't a viable replacement.

    Jason
    ProfQuotes [profquotes.com]

  • The telecom industry is to blame. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by jdehnert ( 84375 ) * <jdehnert @ d e h n ert.com> on Thursday July 10, 2003 @08:39PM (#6411411) Homepage
    Chips have gotten faster. Ram is bigger faster and less expensive. Disk space is dirt cheap.

    But the telecom industry is just crawling in comparison. I use the same phone line for dial up now as I did 10 years ago, and things like ISDN, DSL, and Cable Modems get you better performance, but nothing stellar. I don't think a T-1 has really changed in cost for a very long time.

    Funny, when the bubble was expanding all the talk was about the bandwidth we were suppored to have access to, but it never made it to my house.

    Eschew Obfuscation

  • One cannot discount... (Score:2, Insightful)

    by skogs ( 628589 ) on Thursday July 10, 2003 @08:46PM (#6411449) Journal
    the easy access of removable drives. Simply pull it out of your computer, and walk down the hall. Or Simply pull it out, and walk home with it. Very easy way to transport all those important files(work and pRon) home with you. If you don't have a OC3 line at your house, it definitely is better to carry the drive with you than download it.

    Honestly, there is never a substitute for remote archives and such in case of a fire or something.

  • I disagree. In China, network is fast. (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Fu Ling-Yu ( 688545 ) on Thursday July 10, 2003 @08:50PM (#6411475) Homepage Journal
    Shipping disc by air or boat is quickly way to go between two countries, but inside country bandwidth is good enough to not need to send discs. In China (an example) we install software on school PCs from central location (Ministry of Information in capital city) but do over the internet. It's fast because we have fibre-optic links country wide for data distributions.

    Obviously, this is bad idea if want to send gigabites to America or Europe because of the bad connects you have with China, but inside country, internal network is much faster than sending disc, unless you want to send 1000s of hard disc at a time!

  • Re:Well, depends on what way you look at it. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by captain_craptacular ( 580116 ) on Thursday July 10, 2003 @08:51PM (#6411482)
    Lets see, local cable modem is $39.95 for 5 gigs and $10 a gig past that. So if you can ship 3 160GB HDD's for $30 thats:

    160GBX3 = 480GB / $30 = 16 GB/Dollar

    Cable modem = 1GB/$10 = 1/10 GB/Dollar

    So the mail is cheaper. And probably faster if you consider how long it would take to DL 480GB @ 32KB/sec compared to next day or 2nd day air.

  • Re:Well, depends on what way you look at it. (Score:2, Insightful)

    by damiam ( 409504 ) on Thursday July 10, 2003 @08:58PM (#6411526)
    Really, the title of the article comes upon the conclusion way too quickily

    That's because it's the fucking title. It's supposed to be quick. If you would read the actual article, you would see exactly why it's cheaper in this case to use snail mail.

    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.

    Just because two parties each have a gigabit line does not mean they can sustain a gigabit throughput over the open Internet. That kind of bandwidth is also extraordinarily expensive.

  • The bandwith is there, you just can't have it. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by twitter ( 104583 ) on Thursday July 10, 2003 @09:00PM (#6411535) Homepage Journal
    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.

    What a great example you picked! Cable TV companies are pumping dozens of digital movies accross their system at once, live. Yet they crimp your upload speed to DSL rates or lower, 30KB/s, because they are afraid of people "stealing" movies. This is not a technological problem, it a social one. Big publishers and telcos are afraid of competition and are doing everything in their power to keep you from enjoying technology that's already in place. It's the same old fight Ma Bell used to wage back when they would not alow you to so much as plug a modem into your phoneline.

    How long are people here in the US going to put up with this monkey business?

  • And the stationwagon bypasses the firewall too (Score:5, Insightful)

    by cait56 ( 677299 ) on Thursday July 10, 2003 @09:06PM (#6411568) Homepage

    Not only does a stationwagon full of harddrives have a respectable sustained throughput rate, the contents don't get screened by the firewall. Ditto for the hardrives in a briefcase, or those USB drives on a keychain.

    Exploding capacities of storage drives have implications on attempts to keep data within boundaries, as well as attempts to getting it from point A to point B.

  • Re:Tapes too... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by pclminion ( 145572 ) on Thursday July 10, 2003 @09:08PM (#6411584)
    That figure is per tape, the actual shipment has 1,139 tapes, I think. 10.175GB * 1,139 = ~11.6TB. That *is* impressive bandwith.

    Well in theory, that's not really "bandwidth," it's just a number of bytes. The bandwidth would be the maximum sustained throughput. Essentially, how much data could be delivered per second, if there were a constant stream of trucks pulling in, each carrying 11.6TB. Assume the trucks drive bumper-to-bumper, at 60 MPH. Assume each truck is what, 25' long. At 60 MPH it takes about 0.28 second to travel one truck-length. Therefore, the actual bandwidth is 11.8/0.28 = 42.1 TB per second.

  • Re:No, not even close (Score:5, Insightful)

    by sn00ker ( 172521 ) on Thursday July 10, 2003 @09:59PM (#6411821) Homepage
    Containerise them. Lift the entire container off the back of the truck in one hit and off the truck goes again. You could cut unload time down to a couple of minutes.
    Reminds me of the supermarket distribution plants. Trucks are allocated time slots that are 10 minutes long, and the trucks must arrive exactly on time or they miss out. One forklift unloads the entire truck, and another shifts the pallets into the shelving system. The one nearest me has 20 bays and runs 24x7.
    Never underestimate the ability of a logistics facility to chew through trucked goods.

  • Re:Security (Score:2, Insightful)

    by zymurgyboy ( 532799 ) <zymurgyboy@yahoo.cNETBSDom minus bsd> on Thursday July 10, 2003 @10:54PM (#6412090)

    Word up, my brotha. I can't count how many times our FTP server has been hacked. The authorities are a lot more reliable at busting people for stealing from FEDEX or UPS than they are for script kiddies messing up your server. The result is often the same: you lose your data until you can restore it.

    Only thing is, seems like the FTP gets messed with a whole lot more often. The major shipping carriers insure you equipment and data too.

  • Re:We had a saying back in school too... (Score:1, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 10, 2003 @11:27PM (#6412237)
    WRX Wagon. :)

  • Offload them to where? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by autopr0n ( 534291 ) on Thursday July 10, 2003 @11:37PM (#6412285) Homepage Journal
    At some point you have to actually get the tapes into the computers. Even if the tape drives themselves had relatively infinite bandwidth, it would still take at least 10 seconds to get it off the truck and loaded into the reader. Maybe you could save time by using some sort of SUPER GIANT SPOOL like 2 meters in diameter and height.

    Imagine that, cassettes the size of shipping containers. Of course, if we're going to talk about things like that, we really need to talk about tape read speed too. Lets say the tape thickness is 8 microns [stanford.edu]. In that case, each layer can hold (4-(8*10^-6)*i)*pi where i is the layer number, So the total number of layers is Sum(2*(2-(8*10^-6)*i)*pi) (2*pi*r where r is 2m - 8um*i) for i from 0 to 2/8*10^-6. that gives us about 4*10^11 meters of tape. Even if we spun the tape at the speed of light it would still take 20 minutes to read one tape. At the speed of light, it would take about 1309 seconds to load the data into the computer. Since 1309/100 is 13.9, assuming you did your math right the cost would be $278 million per year. Of course, we can't actualy spin the tapes at the speed of light.

  • Re:We had a saying back in school too... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by dildatron ( 611498 ) on Thursday July 10, 2003 @11:44PM (#6412329)
    Eight Words:

    You're still not doing well with the ladies.

  • The next wave of P2P... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by An Onerous Coward ( 222037 ) on Friday July 11, 2003 @12:42AM (#6412602) Homepage
    ...will be bored college students knocking on each others doors, with USB hard drives full of MP3s. Nodes can be linked via CD-ROM and DVD media. What's the point of buying CDs when you already have literally months worth of music that you haven't even sorted through?

    Honestly, I think RIAA would do well to back off. If they manage to kill off P2P trading, it will only be replaced by something much, much worse.

  • Re:We had a saying back in school too... (Score:1, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 11, 2003 @01:02AM (#6412663)
    Two words Volvo P1800ES [scvcoa.org]

  • Re:No, not even close (Score:3, Insightful)

    by GreenJeepMan ( 398443 ) * <josowski@ t y b i o . c om> on Friday July 11, 2003 @10:07AM (#6414477) Homepage Journal
    This is the dorkiest conversation I have ever heard in my life.

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