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Only reading the comments did I think “Wait, who needs this and why?” I like the Mr. Beast angle - it’s fun to think about if nothing else.
I think at that point you'd just need to do 1 pc every 200 readers and pull the videos to a local server for processing. There's no magic here, just work.
I know it sounds boring, but did anyone suggest a second computer if this is an actual problem and not just a for fun challenge?
Or how about 999 additional computers? They could be really tiny ones, running some kind of operating system designed for putting inside small single purpose machines. You could also add a coloured light on the front of each one and a button that says "copy to NAS".
For instance, if you can spend 2 hours downloading each card, (SPI to an esp32 can do about 32GB an hour) so you could Download 64GB in 2 hours via ESP32 boards with SPI uSD slots, pushed onto your server over wifi6.
If that’s enough, that’s a simple solution. If you need more than 32GB an hour per card, I’ve seen some adapters that hold 10? uSD cards and connect over SATA, so that might get you a better way into the bus than typical USB?
The physical interface itself is going to be a big deal, people are going to be just swapping cards constantly and you'll need multiple people just doing this. Status of read is a big part of this as well so some amount of custom LEDs and such for status of ingress will be required. What a horrible job being in a room with 100s of thousands of SD cards just feeding them into slots and then into an empty bin! Its poss…
Would be a straightforward job for a pick and place style robot, if you had cycle time to budget for it.
The physical interface itself is going to be a big deal, people are going to be just swapping cards constantly and you'll need multiple people just doing this. Status of read is a big part of this as well so some amount of custom LEDs and such for status of ingress will be required. What a horrible job being in a room with 100s of thousands of SD cards just feeding them into slots and then into an empty bin! Its poss…
It still involves annoying work by humans, but it would be much more straightforward: See a bay that is showing the "idle" color, remove any finished card and put it in the finished-box, grab a card from the to-do box and put it in, then press the button to signal a new card is waiting.
If that process took 6 seconds, 1000 cards would mean 100 minutes of tedious work, but you can spread it over multiple people or (since the card-read takes time) do it in short bursts interspersed with other activities.
So, the 1000 card problem is pretty easy. What matters is how much is on each card, and how long the DL window is. For instance, if you can spend 2 hours downloading each card, (SPI to an esp32 can do about 32GB an hour) so you could Download 64GB in 2 hours via ESP32 boards with SPI uSD slots, pushed onto your server over wifi6. If that’s enough, that’s a simple solution. If you need more than 32GB an hour per card,…
If they just need the slots to plug everything in and leave overnight you could probably just run off some PCBs with heaps of card slots per mcu and let it cycle through them one after another
There is only one scenario that remotely makes sense for why this would be even necessary and that's fleet vehicles with dash cams. Even in that case, there are way better approaches because there are dashcams designed for fleet usage that upload to central servers over WiFi. Basically this scenario only makes sense if there is something horribly wrong elsewhere to the point that the only reasonable thing to do is fi…
Bodycams for any number of security orgs (military, police, security guard) in any number of places around the world? I mean, if done right you'd use some kind of wireless-while-they-charge at the end of the day. But given the wide world I could easily see someone somewhere going down this path.
I know it sounds boring, but did anyone suggest a second computer if this is an actual problem and not just a for fun challenge?
Seems like more of a scale out than a scale up problem, with a view on the whole operation from recording footage down to final archive to tackle the real bottleneck.