If you’ve been in IT long enough, you’re bound to hear the phrase “never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon filled with backup tapes.” This was especially true back in the days of dialup connections and leased lines. How does it scale today? First, we have to decide what kind of media we’re going to use. Tape drives are not nearly as common as they once were and their storage density really isn’t impressive. Instead, lets use the most storage dense media that mere mortals can purchase retail (at the time of this writing): The SanDisk 64GB Ultra MicroSDXC.

Now we have our storage worked out, what are we going to haul it in? These days you can’t really get a good sturdy station wagon, but the modern equivalent seems like it would be the SUV. Since Chevrolet Suburbans have been around for so long, I’m going to pick that. According to Chevrolet.com the 2014 Suburban has 137 cubic feet of cargo space. So, how many MicroSD cards can you fit in there?

First we need to find out how big these little guys are, exactly. Wikipedia says that they are  0.59×0.43×0.039 inches. Now, time to do some math:

First, figure out how many cubic inches a Suburban can hold: 137ft³ = 236736 in³

A MicroSD card is only .01 cubic inches, so if all things were equal you could stuff 100 64gb SD cards into a cubic inch of space! But, that does not seem realistic. In fact it doesn’t even seem remotely possible. Plus, Micro SD cards are oddly shaped. Plus, nothing ever stacks just perfect and we have to put them in boxes of some sort that can support the weight of thousands of cards. So, we’re going to reduce that number by 20% when we’re done.

Given the dimensions of the MicroSD card and the size of a cubic foot, a little math later… 174,646 MicroSD cards per cubic foot. Now trim 20% off and you have 139716 MicroSD cards per cubic foot. Remember, we have 137 cubic feet to fill.

19 Million Micro SD Cards

19,141,092 MicroSD cards will fit in a 2014 Chevy Suburban. What does that come out to in Capacity?

1,225,029,888 GigaBytes (Yes, that’s over 1.2 billion GB’s!)
Or
1196318.25 TeraBytes
Or
1168.279541016 PetaBytes
Or
1.14089799 ExaBytes
Or
1/12 Google (per xkcd.com)

Or
398,772   3TB hard drives

Now let’s talk about Bandwidth. We’ll use the old “New York to Los Angeles” as a benchmark. According to Google, that’s a 2,790 mi, 40 hour trek. Since bandwidth is generally measured per second, we’ll measure the trip that way too. A 40 hour trip is 144,000 seconds. Now lets measure the bandwidth:

1,225,029,888 GB in 144,000 seconds = 68057Gbps

In comparison, ATT’s OC-768 fiber optic cable transfers 38.486016 Gbps which is only a 1/1768th of the bandwidth of the Suburban full of MicroSD cards.

That’s a whole lot of bandwidth! One thing we haven’t considered though is actually reading and writing the data off of all those cards, and then putting it back in order. That would take far more time than the actual trip itself, but we’re not counting it because the original saying “Never Underestimate the Bandwidth of a Station Wagon Filled with Backup Tapes” didn’t count it either.

So, when you’re trying to move lots of data, Never Underestimate the Bandwidth of a Suburban Filled with MicroSD cards!

As a long time reader of Slashdot.org, I always wondered what being featured on it would be like. Through the years (I registered around 2001, I think) I’ve seen sites crippled by the “Slashdot effect”, when the site was featured on the front page but wasn’t up to the task of so much traffic. What’s it like to be on the other side of the Slashdot front page, to so speak? What does it to do website stats? Do you get flame broiled in the comments? Does Cowboy Neal call you to personally congratulate you?

In February of 2013 I wrote an article called “Home Server vs. VPS – a quick Cost and Performance analysis“and decided, never thinking that it would be featured, to submit it to Slashdot. The next morning, I was floored to find out that the article landed on the front page! I looked at the statistics for my fairly humble little blog, and the its were rolling in by the hundreds and thousands. In the short course of 2 days, my article received over 30,000 visits!

Now more forward to August 2013 and I had an idea for an article that I thought the Slashdot crowd might be interested in. Besides, if nothing else I just love to write! So I wrote “Experiences and Realities of a Homesourced IT worker.” I spent hours on the article refining the math comparisons and editing it. My wife even lent a hand and helped me make some adjustments that really made the article better. She’s a great editor.

After about a week of writing and editing, I posted it to my blog. And, I submitted it to Slashdot. Nothing. Crickets at best. A few people looked at the article (according to my stats) and it got marked as spam! Oh no! Not to give up quickly, I submitted it again. Not flagged as spam this time, but not much response either. Not being one given to accepting failure, I submitted the story once more and wrote an introduction that wasn’t just the first paragraph of the story. Well, someone liked it because the next morning, it was on the front page!

My statistics took a familiar spike. Suddenly I had over 25,000 page views on this post alone. It leveled off in the evening but the next day, it picked up again. In both cases, the increased traffic lasted for several days. The first time the blog got featured, the traffic was higher permanently and is still higher because of that.

 Social Aspects and the Wrath of the Internet

 Then there’s the social aspect. Slashdot isn’t Facebook (thank the robot overlords) but it has a thriving community that will flame broil any article that isn’t up to snuff. Misquotations and miscalculations will be laboriously lambasted and no grammar error will go left unpunished.

It was pretty awesome. Apparently, I had my act together enough that I received mostly positive comments not just at Slashdot.org but also on This Blog. Some of them were downright complimentary! Sure, people like to give Slashdot a hard time for not being like it used to be, but people have been saying that about Slashdot for as long as I can remember. Its a great community and I still really enjoy it there.

The other aspect was the confirmation of my writing. Friends and family have enjoyed my writing in the past but peer review was something that made me quite nervous. Much to my delight both articles were well received as mentioned, and have energized me to keep writing! And to have my writing be featured on a Big Site like Slashdot was pretty amazing. I hope that I can make more of my writing as time goes by, but for now it shall be confined to This Blog, and its successor which is still in the planning stages.

In Conclusion

 Overall each time I learned something from comments either pointing out a flaw or an alternate argument. Its been a positive experience, one the I hope to repeat again. But more than that its brought me a sense of satisfaction knowing that I was able to connect with my readers and that as a writer was more valuable than anything else.

Oh, and no calls from Cowboy Neal.