Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of ~~tapes~~ flashdrives hurtling down the highway.
this post was submitted on 01 Sep 2023
610 points (92.2% liked)
Technology
58303 readers
15 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
I can carry way more HDDs than that weakass stupid pigeon. So what I can't run to save my life.
Isn't gigabit internet more about amounts of data you can transfer rather than the overt speed that is not important to average user?
I'm reminded of this: https://what-if.xkcd.com/31/
I was looking for this comment just to post:
Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes hurtling down the highway. –Andrew Tanenbaum, 1981
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Popular TechTuber Jeff Geerling has delivered an updated take on the old chestnut about the relative merits of pigeon-based vs internet data transfers.
Spoiler alert: the pigeon with its high-capacity microSD cards won Geerling’s data transfer race by a significant margin.
Famously, in 2009, a South African company compared the transfer speed of a pigeon carrying a 4 GB memory stick vs local ISP Telkom’s ADSL service.
So, he donned a pigeon mask and jumped on a plane to carry 3 TB of files from his home in the US to the Canadian data center, which the internet transfer also targeted.
To conclude, Geerling says he could have easily done better as PiJeff, stuffing his luggage with very high capacity drives, but wanted to stick to the common 3 TB across all alternatives.
Hopefully, another decade later, we will all have broadband measured in petabits, and pigeons won’t have to endure having flash NAND devices strapped to their legs for our amusement (research).
The original article contains 432 words, the summary contains 163 words. Saved 62%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
I was lucky enough to have 2Gb fiber introduced to my area recently - I have to say I rarely notice meaningful differences over my lowest tier cable connection. I pull 1400Mbs on router based tests, but routine endpoint speed tests are 300-700 range. Was 30 on prior connection. Can run more stuff all at once, but still get occasional streaming delays, 5min of low resolution streams, routine downloads are about the same. Now that Mullvad has dropped port forwarding, this pigeon system is sounding pretty attractive.
load more comments
(2 replies)
What's the ping on that bird?
A single packet takes longer to reach the destination, but that single packet can contain shittons of data. Ingenious! Of course... This assumes the packet actually arrives.
load more comments
(1 replies)
did it count the time to load the data onto the hdd and unload it at the other side?
how much time would it take to move 3tb onto a usb3 hdd?
Idk, but depending on your use case, you can probably use the data straight from the drive without transferring it to local storage.
In that case you could also just remotely access the usb stick through the internet without transfering all the data. In the video the guy includes the upload time from the USB stick. USB sticks can transfer data at up to 5gbit/s so it is still faster against a 1 gbit/s internet connection.
With enough cables you could in theory transfer all of them at the same time. To max out the speed you could have each SSD be in a stack of 20 that plugs into a couple of pcie.
I'm pretty sure you can do it in 15 minutes with a well coordinated team and a lot of smart hardware, packaging and freight loading/unloading technology.
If you read the article, yes it did include that
I wish that pigeon can send me approximately 3000 pictures of the Atomium
Yes but not as safe and not as reliable, also not viable over long distances. Furthermore its a one directional transfer.
IPoAC isn't one-way, but it's definitely less reliable. Unfortunately, packets can be lost due to encapsulation from birds of prey, and bad weather also increases dropped packets
Who doubted that sneakernet would be faster?
very variable