Tuesday, May 22, 2007

Never underestimate the bandwidth of...

FedEx has a higher bandwidth than the Internet. Of course, the latency is terrible.

This isn't surprising, given that the information density of disks has increased way faster than bandwidth speeds.

There's an old sysadmin quote: "Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes hurtling down the highway." That's usually attributed to Andy Tanenbaum.

I once drove a pile of full NetApp disk shelves from Boston to NYC and calculated that my bandwidth was around 100Mbps (much faster than our inter-city links at the time).

Via Scalzi.

2 comments:

W said...

Does this include data loss when the shipping professional unloading the truck kicks your 150lb disk shelf down the ramp end over end?

rantingnerd said...

Or when the shipping professional loads their truck by "rolling" your 150lb disk shelf up the ramp end-over-end, yes.