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."

Re:This is pointless

[hjf]

RTFA, AC.

Calculations omit one tiny detail

[Ygorl]

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.

Re:This is pointless

[jc42]

It's the read-write to physical medium that are the bottleneck with the sneakernet now.

Yeah, but it's competing with high-speed networks that are crippled by the ISPs at both ends using a single fibre to feed an entire neighborhood, and intentionally slowing the speed at the customer's site to a crawl unless you pay an exorbitant rate for a higher speed (which is then unused 99% of the time, and doesn't deliver if 2 or 3 others in your neighborhood are using high speed at the same time).

It's not surprising that vehicle+SD card could outperform such a network. The ping times can be rather long, though.

Re:The bandwidth of a human.

[EmagGeek]

If you're trying to smuggle your own data across the border without it being copied by the NSA (as is routine for entry into the US for CBP to confiscate and make an image of your laptop HDD for NSA), swallowing a MicroSD is not so implausible or impractical.

Re:The bandwidth of a human.

[phayes]

Yeah, right. Border authorities couldn't possibly detain someone on suspicion of smuggling data internally & wait for it to come out like they already do for drug mules. No, no, it could never happen...

It'd be nice if you wouldn't demean words like "routine" into meaninglessness and stop confusing the NSA with the US customs authorities. Yeah we've all heard of incidents where laptops & drives have been confiscated but this is not a routine occurrence -- If you want to claim otherwise deliver a reliable reference giving the total number of incidents per year (you're the one claiming it's "routine" so it's on you to justify your claim). I'll divide that by the number of border crossings & we'll all have a benchmark on how often it happens per border crossing & just how "routine" it is.