Re: [TUHS] History repeating itself

On 30 Jul 2016 10:15 -0400, from cowan(a)mercury.ccil.org (John Cowan): You could, however, get an economy class flight ticket and load up your suitcase with either HDDs or SDXCs (I suspect SDXCs would be better per amount of data from the perspective of both volume and weight, and would take better to handling). Given FedEx's prices, _once you have the infrastructure set up_ (which you'll need whether you have someone travel with the media, by air or by stationwagon, or FedEx it), that _might_ even compare favorably in terms of bytes transferred per second per dollar. (Now that's a measurement of throughput I don't think I've seen before; B/s/$.) Of course, you'd need someone who can babysit the suitcase, which potentially adds to the cost, but the stationwagon traditionally hasn't been self-driving either, and most of a transatlantic flight isn't active time on part of the person travelling with the suitcase so you could go with an overnight flight and allow the person to sleep. If you want to reduce the risk of the bag getting handled roughly or lost in handling, reduce the above to carry-on luggage; it will still provide a quite respectable throughput. If carry-on allows 10 kg (it's been quite a while since I flew commercially) and a SDXC card that can store 200 GB weighs 5 grams (seems a reasonable back-of-the-napkin estimate), that would allow approximately 200 GB * 2,000 = 400 TB transferred in say ten hours flight time, for a 40 TB/h ~ 11 GB/s (90 Gb/s) throughput, disregarding the time to write to and read from the media (which applies equally with a stationwagon or FedEx). If the ticket costs $500, that's roughly 200 Mb/s per dollar (and remember, we are only relying on carry-on here). What's more, it is relatively trivially parallelizable at an approximately linear increase in cost, and can be scaled according to need at each time. If you can live with the risk of rough handling, the throughput per dollar approximately quadruples (700-900 Mb/s/$) given a 20 kg per person maximum checked-in baggage weight. It might not be the absolute cheapest approach, but it seems rather hard to beat in terms of throughput per dollar for bulk data transfer, especially if you already have someone who would travel anyway and can be convinced to take a company-approved suitcase in return for having their ticket paid for. -- Michael Kjörling • https://michael.kjorling.se • michael(a)kjorling.se “People who think they know everything really annoy those of us who know we don’t.” (Bjarne Stroustrup)