• beeng@discuss.tchncs.de
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    8 months ago

    There was an article the other day where like so many TB fit on a disc with a new laser, and really made me think, how much TB on a disc would it take to make our internet look like pigeon mail again?

    I mean we need the media quality to utilise it all, but it doesn’t yet cos of the cost of storage and portability. But if 5TB fit on a disc, man would the landscape change.

    • Zink@programming.dev
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      8 months ago

      Once unlimited fiber internet comes to somebody’s neighborhood, it seems like we’d need a new use case to make sneakernet / pigeonverse worth it for consumer use. People download 100+GB games every day without a second thought.

      Maybe there are some cases where it would be nice to carry a ton of data physically with you, but you can already fit a lot of data in a small portable hard drive.

      • GamingChairModel@lemmy.world
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        8 months ago

        Certain scientific applications require really large amounts of raw data, collected from sensors and the like. Radio telescopes, for example, require each sensor to send petabytes of data to a central place to be analyzed. For example, the Event Horizon telescope has sensors all over the world, and hard drives of the recorded data get sent to be analyzed in the United States and Germany.

        For residential applications, though, yeah. There currently isn’t much of a use case for sneakernet where you can get terabytes of data with latency above a few days.