• J'Pol @lemmy.sdf.org
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    11 hours ago

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

    • FuglyDuck@lemmy.world
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      11 minutes 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.)

      • Valmond@lemmy.world
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        24 minutes 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.

        • FuglyDuck@lemmy.world
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          12 minutes 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.)

    • qjkxbmwvz
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      7 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@lemmy.world
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        4 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.