this post was submitted on 22 Jun 2023
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never underestimate the bandwidth of a van full of hard drives
We have 1 TB microSDs. A pigeon could probably carry at least 100. If I did my math right(which i probably didn't), if it takes 24 hours of travel that's still a 8Gb/s connection.
Reminds me of AWS Snowmobile, which is literally a shipping container filled with harddrives.
There's also versions at smaller scales that Google and Amazon have. A lot of times even less than 10TB of data can be easier to physically ship than to upload since you may have to saturate your connection for while for that which isn't feasible for many especially businesses
I'm somewhat surprised to learn that each Snowmobile unit is only about 100PB in a 45x8x9.6ft highwall shipping container
Gonna ballpark in stupid units to see how wrong my intuition that that's not very dense is:
Assuming dense but not hot new thing spinning rust, 16TB per 34.5 cubic inch standard 3.5" disc.
(100PB/16TB)*2 (assume at least two spindle redundant) is about 12,000 discs, so about 414,000 cubic inches of just discs without any of the supporting equipment.
A highwall shipping container is like 5,900,000 cubic inches, so only like 7% of that thing would be discs.
Or, accommodating a little bit of the support, let's say it's just full of those commodity 90-bay 4U storage servers. Those are 19" x 7" x 26.4" (3511.2 cubic inches) for 1440 raw TB each, again 2 spindle redundancy so you'd need about 140 of the things for 100PB, round up to 500,000 cubic inches of those... still less than 9%.
Yeah, unless I did my math radically wrong, that's surprisingly not very dense.
Yeah, it really sounds a bit low. I'm not sure what else goes into these containers. I assume there might also be a bunch of portable equipment and cabling that goes into moving the data in and out of the container? Power infrastructure and cooling and what probably takes up quite a bit of space as well.
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CyirISpUAAA__xV.jpg
Id assume rhey put in some standard racks on shock absorbers and more redundancy than usual,
And wired all that up to acentral input.
Its probably not build to minmax the capacity,
but to fit the largest usecases.
reminds me of factotrio's cars on belts...