Unix v4 Tape Found

Post by bigiain » Wed, Nov 12, 2025, 12:03 AM UTC

compsciphd wrote: post #97

whizzter wrote: post #59

Someone in the Mastodon thread mentioned the Andrew Tannenbaum "Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes hurtling down the highway." So I wondered about a modern day equivalent, looked up 1tb micro-sd cards (sold locally for Nintendo Switch) and calculated that there'd be roughly space for 400 exabytes of data in a shipping container filled to the brim with SD-cards. (SDcard being 1tb for 1.…

I used to be a digitial hoarder (now less so, but I still have what I hoarded, built over a 15 year period). When I moved overseas, I shipped my 120HDs (~600TB) in a container (120 HDs don't take up "that" much space (they all arrived in one piece, though 5 have died, though only 3 non recoverable, after the first one died, I made sure to image each one first and then writing it back (bitrot was a problem)). anyways,…

Post by avar » Thu, Nov 13, 2025, 9:33 AM UTC

bigiain wrote: post #100

avar wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually a shipping container full of micro-SD cards hurtling down the highway has lower overall bandwidth than a 56k modem. That's because whoever's attempting to load an ideal 400 million micro-SD cards into one will take approximately forever carefully trying to line up even one row of them on the floor of a shipping container, before having the whole thing fall over like dominoes. And even if they manage that, th…

Dans Data (RIP that website, apparently) did this backup tapes to microSD cards update about 15 years ago. He started with "Well, first we need to know how big our station wagon is. I hereby arbitrarily declare it to be a 1985 Volvo 240, which has 2.2 cubic metres of cargo capacity." and "I'm also going to assume that the wagon isn't really packed totally full of memory cards, such that they cascade into the front wh…

    > he also addressed the packing problem, saying[...]