What's the word for data transfer by carrying a drive?

May 1, 2007 5:22 PM

What's the comedic/facetious word/phrase for extremely high bandwidth as a result of just plain carrying a disk drive? I remember reading an article somewhere that referred to the high-latency, super-high-bandwidth transfer speeds obtained by just picking up a hard drive and taking it somewhere. I was thinking it was HAN (Human Area Network), but that apparently has a different meaning. I've seen the term in more than one place, so I know it wasn't just a one-off in that article, but try as I might (and google as I might) I can't remember the term.
posted by bugbread to computers & internet (19 comments total)

Sneakernet?
posted by magicbus at 5:24 PM on May 1, 2007

2nding Sneakernet
posted by mge at 5:25 PM on May 1, 2007

Sneakernet. There was an old Mondo 2000 that had a line about never underestimating the bandwidth of a station wagon full of magtape.
posted by adipocere at 5:29 PM on May 1, 2007

Bingo bango thanks! It was indeed sneakernet. Been bugging me for weeks!
posted by bugbread at 5:30 PM on May 1, 2007

Thirding "sneakernet."
posted by Cool Papa Bell at 5:30 PM on May 1, 2007

FedEx still moves more data every night (on tape and disk) than all the world's telecom carriers combined.
posted by paulsc at 5:37 PM on May 1, 2007

Even snails are faster than adsl.
posted by chrisamiller at 5:37 PM on May 1, 2007

You may have also heard the quote "Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes hurtling down the highway."
posted by adamrice at 5:51 PM on May 1, 2007 [1 favorite]

Huh? I wish I understood this idea. :(
posted by DieHipsterDie at 6:12 PM on May 1, 2007

Adamrice, the way I've always heard that one was:

"Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon loaded with backup tapes."

DieHipsterDie, back in the day (long before my day, that is) if you needed to move data around it was often quite convenient to walk or drive it to where it needed to get to, rather than rely on slow, expensive, pay-by-the-bit network links.

As an aside, I've heard that Google sends shipping containers loaded with servers (in order to update their Web index around the world), since it's cheaper and faster to pay Fedex to move the bits than it would be to send them over the wire.
posted by killdevil at 6:23 PM on May 1, 2007

paulsc writes "FedEx still moves more data every night (on tape and disk) than all the world's telecom carriers combined."

Netflix alone ships at least 8 PetaBytes (1.6 million DVDs a day X a 5GB average per = 8,000,000GB) every day. That's quite the pipe no matter how you slice it.
posted by Mitheral at 6:54 PM on May 1, 2007

To take this to a logical extreme, see Sun's Project Black Box.
posted by zamboni at 7:00 PM on May 1, 2007

And in terms of number of customers, FedEx is still the largest off-site backup media rotation facility in the world. For years, I got a 2nd day delivery every business day from a client across the country, which had his back up media from the day before. I slapped a pre-printed return label on it, which had his account billing information on it, and sent it back to him, at his expense. He had the same call back arrangement thusly as he would have had with an offsite tape service, but his tapes were going well beyond the influence of any regional disaster. And they could be easily re-directed, within a day, to hot site facilities anywhere FedEx delivered. Took me 30 seconds a day to provide the service.
posted by paulsc at 7:26 PM on May 1, 2007 [3 favorites]

I'm sure that at one point. the US/UK Usenet link was a tape being handed to a transatlantic pilot every couple of days, but I can't find a reference to it now.
posted by Leon at 7:38 PM on May 1, 2007

The specific term 'sneakernet' has for me a specific connotation of local scale, too—a sneakernet LAN was floppies from one side of the room to the other, for example, literally a few sneaker steps. Obviously it applies to wider scales as well, but that's always been the dominant image in my mind.
posted by cortex at 9:31 PM on May 1, 2007

Coretx, that was my understanding of the term as well. It was in pretty common use back in the mid 90's. And yes, it was often more convenient and reliable than the networked alternatives.
posted by tim_in_oz at 9:52 PM on May 1, 2007

cortex: my favorite variation of your sneakernet LAN was "ninjanet", a.k.a. tossing 3.5" floppies across the room to your buddy like they were totally sweet throwing stars.

Frisbee-style for accuracy, overhand for high-speed burst transfers. Awesome.
posted by jmcmurry at 11:15 PM on May 1, 2007 [1 favorite]

There was an interesting article about Google making a sneakernet for large sets of scientific data in Wired recently,

The project comes out of DiBona's efforts last fall to put together an informal system in which Google acts as both a repository and courier for large data sets between teams of scientists. Now, he leads a team that sets up small form-factor PCs, hooked up to drive arrays that can store up to 3 terabytes of data.

The process lightens the load, but it isn't simple: DiBona ships both the PC and array to teams of scientists at various research institutions, which then connect their local servers to the array via an eSATA connection. Once the data transfer is complete, the drives get sent straight back to Mountain View, where DiBona and others copy the data to Google's servers for archival purposes. The idea then is that if other scientists around the world needed access to such a large quantity of data, Google would simply reverse the process.

"Right now, we're just acting as a conduit," DiBona says. "We make a copy of it, and then we can use the hard drives for something else. They'll get banged around a little bit too much (to store the data directly on the drives). They're not intended to be a long-term storage medium -- they're like envelopes to us."

posted by MetaMonkey at 11:16 PM on May 1, 2007

Used to be a lot of USENET black sites too. Places where security was so tight they didn't have a link to the outside so USENET (oneway) was brought in on tapes.
posted by Mitheral at 3:32 PM on May 2, 2007