Comment by whizzter
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 1.092 x 1,499 x 0,102 CM's and a shipping container being 1203 x 235 x 239 CM's inside so holding 400 million SD cards)
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, the whole thing will tumble over once they need to deal with the first row of the container's side corrugation. Nobody at the department of Spherical Cows in Vacuums thought to account for those dimensions[1] not lining up with the size of micro-SD cards.
If they do manage some approximation of this it'll take forever just to drive this down the road, let alone get the necessary permits to take the thing on the highway.
Turns out not a lot of semi truck trailers or roads are prepared to deal with a 40 ft container weighing around 100 metric tons (the weight of one packed to the brim with sand, a close approximation).
The good news is that such transportation gets more fuel efficient the longer the trip is.
The bad news is that the container will arrive mostly empty, as it's discovered that shipping container door panel gaps and road vibrations conspire to spread a steady stream of micro-SD cards behind you the entire way there.
Commuters in snowy areas held up behind the slowly moving "OVERSIZED LOAD!" with a mandatory police escort wonder if it's a trial for a new type of road salt that makes a pleasant crunchy sound as you drive over it.
Finally, an attempt to recover the remaining data fails. The sharding strategy chosen didn't account for failure due to road salt ingression into the container, cards at the bottom of the container being crushed to dust by the weight of those above, or that the leased container hadn't been thoroughly cleaned since last transporting, wait, what is that smell?
1. https://www.discovercontainers.com/wp-content/uploads/contai...