Insignificant, compared with...
2005-04-25 09:08 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mdlbearQuick observation:
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sbisson quotes from a press release today:
And it's quite true that we're talking about a CD per second, or a half-dozen or so DVDs every minute. But it's still true that storage is getting cheaper much faster than bandwidth: 500TB is only 2000 250GB hard drives, of the sort you can buy down at Fry's for about $125 each. Next year it will be half that many drives, and the price per drive will be about the same.
Now, my measurements show that a hard drive is about 1" by 4" by 6" -- 24 cubic inches. All 500TB will fit in a box 20" by 40" by 60", provided they don't have to be powered up. And if you put them in the back of a minivan, or the cargo hold of a jet plane, of course they wouldn't be. I imagine you could deliver a box like that to each of the seven sites in half a day by courier, or about a day by overnight express.
At work, it takes me over an hour to download a CD image over our T1 line. It only takes half an hour for me to drive home with it. Let's not even think about the bandwidth of a 747 full of SD cards, shall we?
sbisson quotes from a press release today: Today, in a significant milestone for scientific grid computing, eight major computing centres successfully completed a challenge to sustain a continuous data flow of 600 megabytes per second (MB/s) on average for 10 days from CERN(1) in Geneva, Switzerland to seven sites in Europe and the US. The total amount of data transmitted during this challenge--500 terabytes--would take about 250 years to download using a typical 512 kilobit per second household broadband connection.Sounds impressive, doesn't it?
And it's quite true that we're talking about a CD per second, or a half-dozen or so DVDs every minute. But it's still true that storage is getting cheaper much faster than bandwidth: 500TB is only 2000 250GB hard drives, of the sort you can buy down at Fry's for about $125 each. Next year it will be half that many drives, and the price per drive will be about the same.
Now, my measurements show that a hard drive is about 1" by 4" by 6" -- 24 cubic inches. All 500TB will fit in a box 20" by 40" by 60", provided they don't have to be powered up. And if you put them in the back of a minivan, or the cargo hold of a jet plane, of course they wouldn't be. I imagine you could deliver a box like that to each of the seven sites in half a day by courier, or about a day by overnight express.
At work, it takes me over an hour to download a CD image over our T1 line. It only takes half an hour for me to drive home with it. Let's not even think about the bandwidth of a 747 full of SD cards, shall we?
