On Mon, Mar 7, 2011 at 11:20 AM, Kent Borg <kentb...@borg.org> wrote: > Rich Braun wrote: >> 6TB might sound like a lot, but you can just buy three 2TB drives for a total >> of about $250 at today's prices, copy the data off to them, and toss them in >> a >> friend's closet. > > If you stay physical, maybe use something like > http://us.startech.com/product/SAT3540ER2-35in-4-Drive-eSATA-RAID-External-Hard-Drive-Enclosure-with-Controller > to put them in. (I've played with the two-drive version and it seems to > work.) > > And buy enough copies of your setup so you can ping-pong changing data, > always keeping one complete copy off-site, never put all your important > data at the location of a single lightning strike, flood, fire, theft, > coredump... > >> "Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full >> of magtapes driving down the freeway at 60mph". ;-) >> > > I love that quote, I remember when that quote was current, but I wonder > whether I am old enough that we have finally made that station wagon > look less impressive? Magtape reels (the media from the vintage of the > quote) are pretty low density, a good net connection might stack up nicely. > > Lessee, Wikipedia suggests 170 MB per tape, a box of 12 is going to > weigh quite a bit, but maybe they came that way, let's say 24-boxes fit > in a station wagon, that puts us (in round numbers) at 50GB (equal to 4 > Ipod Nanos in your pocket, with space for quite a few tunes left over). > Wikipedia says Fios is 155Mb upstream...if I did my math right, that's > less than an hour to send. Maybe the station wagon (original Wagoneer?) > is big and has a stiff suspension and it can hold 48-boxes: well under > 2-hours. > > To update the quote: Never underestimate the bandwidth of an SUV full of > SATA disks driving down the freeway at 60MPH. (Heck, just a single 2TB > disk sent overnight to the other coast...looks like just about equal to > Fios upload speed.) > > > -kb, the Kent who doesn't have Fios. > > > > P.S. Jeepers, one of those tough metal screwtop containers for keeping > heart pills handy on a keyring...looks like it can hold well over one TB > in micro SD cards: A convoy of ten to twenty station wagons (circa 1980). > _______________________________________________ > Discuss mailing list > Discuss@blu.org > http://lists.blu.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss >
In the 1980's we did move data centers from city to city with boxes of either 6250Bpi reels or data cartridges. (depending on where we were going to and coming from)... It was a small van stacked to the ceiling. Started backups after work ended in Denver on Friday night, once the first few cases were ready, flew them to Houston and started restores. The new Denver computer center was in Houston and running before 7AM Houston time Monday running on a virtual system, and all traffic for the Denver data center was re-routed over the network to Houston. We left the computer and drives all powered up and running (just off the normal network) for a week before it was shut down and IBM moved their mainframe to Houston too. We did the same thing several times as we moved from 7 data centers to 2. Then to 1 (I was in Houston, and we lost, it all moved to Tulsa, then I moved to Unix - Sun Solaris/SunOS ). Even a big data center then was about 4T of disks, and a few thousand tapes. Today it doesn't take much to get data centers that big in a back room of a mom&pop shop. _______________________________________________ Discuss mailing list Discuss@blu.org http://lists.blu.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
