Sneakernet would have been faster

[mdlbear]

I'm in the process of decommissioning my old desktop machine, which has a noisily-expiring CPU fan. It's had a good run; I'm not complaining. But I just spend the last 2 hours, almost exactly, transferring 55GB of data off it and onto my new desktop.

That's about 25GB/hour. It would have been faster if I'd been able to use gigabit etnernet (which both machines have, but my ageing hub doesn't), but not ten times faster because I would have been limited by the speed of the disks. Maybe five times -- call it 24 minutes or so. So I could have saved time by driving down to Fry's and buying a GigE hub, but not much.

It would have been faster still to power down both machines, pull out the drive, and move it over. Ten minutes, maybe. Except that the new machine doesn't have room in its case for another drive, and I wanted to keep reading blogs working while I was slinging bits.

Comments

[kyburg.livejournal.com]

Gawd, I haven't heard "sneakernet" in years....thanks for the flashback!

[asavitzk.livejournal.com]

No crossover?

[mdlbear]

Not if I wanted to keep using the network for other things. Besides, there are web servers on both machines that might have been missed if I took them offline. Plus the fact that the degenerate subnet would have been left without a DNS server, which would have had to create host table entries.

Sure, it took two hours, but it's not as though anything had to wait for it to finish.