DescentBB

Someone (I forget who) once said, "Never underestimate the bandwidth of a car full of hard drives."

OK, so I want to work out how big that bandwidth is. let's work it out. lets take a large station wagon, and load it to the gunwalls with 200GB HDDs.

How many will fit inside the car? If we use a bit of padding to separate the drives, we can count on putting around 2000 or so inside a fully loaded wagon. That works out to be 200 GB x 2000 = 400,000,000,000,000 Bytes or 400 Terabytes (TB).

Let's say we need to transfer the data 500 kilometres at an average speed of 90Km/h. That's a travel time of 5.5 hours, or 330 minutes. Let's be pessimistic and say it takes a combined total of 4 minutes to remove a HDD at the start, and install it at the end - and only one guy is doing it. 4 x 200 = 800 minutes.

So we can move 400 terabytes in 1130 minutes (18.8 hours or 67,800 seconds).

400,000,000,000,000 / 67800 = 5,899,705,015 Bytes/second

That's 5.9GB/s or 47,197,640,120 bps.
It's equates to a DVD every second.

I could live with that.

Conveniently, it's almost exactly 1/3rd of the bandwidth available over the Southern Cross Cable which connects New Zealand to the USA. WHOA.

I wonder how many DVDs you could fit into that same car? Yes, I know, it's full of Hard Drives! We'd take them out first...

Mobi, you must get really bored sometimes.

This is in the tech forum why?

Dammit, threads like this makes me wish Stiny wasn't in boot camp right now.

MD-2389 wrote:Dammit, threads like this makes me wish Stiny wasn't in boot camp right now.

Stingy*

what did stingy poo do?

Don't you need to account for the time required to transfer files on/off the vehicle? The car will have to transfer to another medium. With fiber or copper, the data is offloaded as fast as it is received. No?

a DVD a second over fibre isn't that far-fetched. Just not widely availible.

Ace: Stingy joined I think the Army. Or the Air Force.

Heh. Mobi, you should patent that idea as a new form of asynchronous data transfer and make millions!!!11

Just hope your car doesn't get in a wreck and wipe all your data

woodchip wrote:Just hope your car doesn't get in a wreck and wipe all your data

Does that qualify as a hard drive crash?

That sounds great, Mobius, but I think some latency problems would arise when it comes to gaming.

And consider the heat build up if youre actually running the drives while driving.

Another brilliant idea from NZ!

crackhead.

wtF Mobi..... Lol. Yeah, sell a "new way you have to transmit 5.9GB/s!"

I want to get my hands on one of these Southern Cross Cables... run it to my house

I bet running a T1 down in NZ must be pretty freakin expensive, no?

fliptw wrote:Ace: Stingy joined I think the Army. Or the Air Force.

Army. He should be close to halfway through boot by now.

I chuckled.

Well if you want to be anal, it's not really bandwidth in as much as throughput. You're not transferring a dvd of data in the span of a second, which is what bandwidth would imply, but you are getting that much throughput given that period of time.

But either way, the lag will kill you.

"90Km/h" Well, you ain't doing that around here, especially in bumper-to-bumper traffic.

Perhaps a helicopter would be a better transport solution. Or Supersonic jet. Or even better, HYPERSONIC! Yea. Hypersonic.

Hypersonic == Supersonic
Hyposonic == Subsonic.

Top Gun wrote:

woodchip wrote:Just hope your car doesn't get in a wreck and wipe all your data

Does that qualify as a hard drive crash?

LOL!

No - we'd use sorbathane padding, so even a major crash wouldn't damage the data. Remember, most HDDs, in powered off mode are capable of withstanding shocks measured in hundreds of G's (i.e. a drop on 1 meter onto a concrete floor) without dying.

It's just an interesting mental exercise - and yes - of course it is "bandwidth", it's just VERY HIGH LATENCY bandwidth. And it's only designed to move incredibly large amounts of data, over relatively short distances - where latency is not an issue.

This sort of service would be ideal for Tier 1 Corporate clients which have to to move terabyte databases across short distances, to secure storage locations.

The WD2000JD weighs in at 1.6lbs/.73kg. At 2000, you're hauling over a ton and a half-- 3200lbs, or 1460kg.

Mobius wrote:we can count on putting around 2000 or so inside a fully loaded wagon. That works out to be 200 GB x 2000 = 400,000,000,000,000 Bytes or 400 Terabytes

I think you need to also consider the weight of 2000 hard drives. Lets assume that you are using a Seagate drive like http://www.seagate.com/support/disc/man ... ata_pm.pdf that weighs 1.4 lbs or 635 grams. 2000 of these drives would be too much for most wagons that I know of. You might be able to put 1000 of them in and be ok. Just don't hit any bumps on the road.

RC

Well then, make it a Super Duty.

i'd prefer a large catapult, or perhaps pneumatic air cannon that fires single HDDs, or perhaps a lashing together of multiple HDDs.
and then on the other side we can catch them in mid air with 2 helicopters with a hookline strung between them. it'l work i'm sure


and if you were t go with Mobi's idea, how would you hack?

"ok, we arrange the HDDs together as a large giant Badger..."

roid wrote:i'd prefer a large catapult, or perhaps pneumatic air cannon that fires single HDDs, or perhaps a lashing together of multiple HDDs.
and then on the other side we can catch them in mid air with 2 helicopters with a hookline strung between them. it'l work i'm sure

Better yet, bring out the old V-2 rockets and fire them back and forth. When they get close to their target, it'll open a hatch and drop the hard drive out a little hatch and it'll float down on a parachute.

1.5 metric tons is no trouble for a grunty station wagon with uprated suspension.

Even if those drives are hot swap, you'll have a nice long time getting the data onto and off of them.