[ale] Tubes

[JK]

Drag0n wrote:

> Never underestimate the Bandwidth of a tractor trailer full of DVD's 
> cruising down the interstate, latency sucks arse, but the throughput is 
> there.

Someone had to do it:

Let's see... assuming the DVDs are in cases, and a DVD case
is 1/4"x 6"x6", I get about 4 petabytes per 40' trailer.
(That's 640K DVDs/trailer x 6GB/DVD.) (Unless I'm wrong about
peta==1.0e15...)

Given a 24-hour road-trip, and assuming that the DVDs can be
automatically unloaded from and loaded into an appropriately
sized jukebox at each end in a negligible amount of time
(maybe the trailer *is* the jukebox), then bandwitdh is
about 356 gigabits/sec.

Double that for double-sided disks, and double (?) it
again for double-sided-double-layer (DSDL?) disks.

If we want to ship the DVDs in sleeves rather than cases,
the trailer-as-jukebox idea might not be so practical, but
I bet we could get another order of magnitude or so, for a
total of (somewhere in the neighborhood of) 14 terabits/sec.

Not bad. It'll probably seem wimpy in ten years or
so, though.

-- JK

OK, OK, I'm going back to work now. Jeez.