@coolboymew the funniest part is that occasionally someone does strap whatever the current equivalent of a terabyte SD card is to a homing pigeon and beats an ISP in throughput. I’ve seen news of one of those cases relatively recently. (This year or the past couple of years.)
> Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes hurtling down the highway.
Andrew S. Tanenbaum
And I've heard that people still transfer some files like backups in similar ways, because while internet is pretty good for latency and small packets, a massive jumbo packet like a truck just beats it entirely.
@lanodan @coolboymew apparently the Event Horizon Telescope (global array of radio-telescopes) uses people flying on planes with suitcases full of HDDs as the main form of data transfer.
Each telescope records at a rate of 64 Gbps, and each observation period can last more than 10 hours. This means each site generates around half a petabyte of data per run. With each site recording simultaneously, Blackburn said the high recording speed and sheer volume of data captured made it impractical to upload to a cloud.
Specially as a case full of HDDs also means that you're cheating a bit like if you'd have several internet links instead of one.
@lanodan @coolboymew there’s a picture of that somewhere but I can’t find it :-/