• J'Pol
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    16 hours ago

    Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes hurtling down the hiway.

    • FuglyDuck
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      5 hours ago

      Ages ago, there was a time where my dad would mail back up tapes for offsite storage because their databases were large enough that it was faster to put it through snail mail.

      It should also be noted his databases were huge, (they’d be bundled into 70 pound packages and shipped certified.)

      • @[email protected]
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        66 hours ago

        Just a couple of years ago I was sent a dataset by mail, around 1TB on a hard drive.

        Later I worked on visualization of large datasets, we didn’t have the space to store them locally because they were up to a PB.

        • @[email protected]
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          20 minutes ago

          Mail dataset in standard-compliant way. Like RFC1149. Don’t forget that carrier should be avian carrier.

          we didn’t have the space to store them locally because they were up to a PB.

          Local is very vague word. It can be argued, that anything, that doesn’t fit into L1 cache is not local.

        • FuglyDuck
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          35 hours ago

          We’re storing data in peanut butter? Please tell me there’s jam involved.

          /j it’s amazing we’re talking about petabytes. My first computer had like 600 meg. (Pentium 486 cobbled out of spare- old- parts from my dad’s junk”Parts” rack.)

          • @[email protected]
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            24 hours ago

            😁 ya my first “computer” was a ZX-81 with 1kB of ram, type too much and it was full! A card with a whopping 16kB later came to the rescue.

            It’s been a wild time in history.

    • @[email protected]
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      413 hours ago

      Awesome bandwidth to be sure, but I do think there is a difference between data transfer to RAM (such as network traffic) vs. traffic purely from one location to another (station wagon with tapes/747 with SD cards/etc.).

      For the latter, actually using the data in any meaningful way is probably limited to read time of the media, which is likely slow.

      But yeah, my go-to would be micro SD cards on a plane :)

      • FuglyDuck
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        29 hours ago

        Well, it depends on the purpose of the data. If it’s meant as an offsite backup… well… you’re probably it driving them just down the street anyway.