Never Underestimate the Bandwidth of a Suburban Filled With MicroSD Cards 208
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."
Jet full of CDs (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:This is pointless (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
TFA says that they have 19 million SD cards. If each one is a mid-range 6 megabyte per second speed and we access them all in parallel, that gives 912 terabit per second potential max bandwidth, which almost certainly exceeds any network you're thinking about.
Re:This is pointless (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Jet full of CDs (Score:5, Interesting)
I do recall a story about Maersk moving their data centre from the US to Denmark, using one of their planes as a carrier, filled with harddisks.
Re:station wagon? (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:Petabyte tablet (Score:2, Interesting)
If that's the scene I'm thinking about, they were trying to pull incredibly valuable data off an ancient computer on a dead planet. Considering its condition, that kind of file recovery speed would make me happy, too.
Re:station wagon? (Score:4, Interesting)
"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.