Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Theory crafting a system for 1000 simultaneous micro SD card ingests

forum.level1techs.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

1–10 of 38 posts

Re: Theory crafting a system for 1000 simultaneous micro SD card ingests

#2

Post by nullpoint420 »

I was not expecting that thread to go in that direction. At first my nerd brain kicked in and I started doing the PCIe napkin math - but then I got to the post asking "why?" and found myself asking the same question.

I am also a bit perplexed on why they'd need to ingest 1,000 micro-SD cards at once. If they are such a large org, why not investigate alternative solutions?

Re: Theory crafting a system for 1000 simultaneous micro SD card ingests

#3

Post by nomel »

nullpoint420 wrote: post #2

I was not expecting that thread to go in that direction. At first my nerd brain kicked in and I started doing the PCIe napkin math - but then I got to the post asking "why?" and found myself asking the same question. I am also a bit perplexed on why they'd need to ingest 1,000 micro-SD cards at once. If they are such a large org, why not investigate alternative solutions?

When only reading the title, my first assumption was that it's a micro-SD card hardware validation test engineer trying to outsource their test station design.

Re: Theory crafting a system for 1000 simultaneous micro SD card ingests

#5

Post by jackvalentine »

RockRobotRock wrote: post #4

"i can provide more details if needed but some things i am under an NDA so i may not be able to answer specifics" LOL why are these people helping this guy for free?

It’s an interesting problem, that’s why.

Re: Theory crafting a system for 1000 simultaneous micro SD card ingests

#6

Post by tristor »

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 fix things to involve a network, not to try to figure out how to scale a sneakernet operation.

Re: Theory crafting a system for 1000 simultaneous micro SD card ingests

#7

Post by PaulKeeble »

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 possible from a PCI-E bandwidth point of view but its going to require some seriously specialist USB interfaces. I am tempted by the same solution others suggest, smaller amounts per machine less expensive and extreme solutions into normal switches and then out across fibre.

What a crazy thing to be doing, the mad situations companies get themselves into when they should just have networked cameras and VPNs or at the very least distributed ingress machines!

Re: Theory crafting a system for 1000 simultaneous micro SD card ingests

#8

Post by Kirby64 »

tristor wrote: post #6

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…

> There is only one scenario that remotely makes sense for why this would be even necessary and that's fleet vehicles with dash cams.

Or, 1000 action cameras (GoPro or equivalent). I only know of one outfit that currently does that, and they definitely would need to dump all 1000 at once to keep production rolling.

I’m pretty sure, although not certain, this is an employee of MrBeast or an affiliate.

Re: Theory crafting a system for 1000 simultaneous micro SD card ingests

#9

Post by Kirby64 »

nullpoint420 wrote: post #2

I was not expecting that thread to go in that direction. At first my nerd brain kicked in and I started doing the PCIe napkin math - but then I got to the post asking "why?" and found myself asking the same question. I am also a bit perplexed on why they'd need to ingest 1,000 micro-SD cards at once. If they are such a large org, why not investigate alternative solutions?

> I am also a bit perplexed on why they'd need to ingest 1,000 micro-SD cards at once. If they are such a large org, why not investigate alternative solutions?

Action cameras use microSD cards as their main storage medium. You could connect them via WiFi on some models, but that would be painfully slow compared to dumping the SD cards directly.

Re: Theory crafting a system for 1000 simultaneous micro SD card ingests

#10

Post by snypher »

PaulKeeble wrote: post #7

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.
Post reply on HN