Submitted 1 year ago by L4s@lemmy.world [bot] to technology@lemmy.world
https://www.tomshardware.com/news/yes-a-pigeon-is-still-faster-than-gigabit-fiber-internet
Yes, a Pigeon is Faster for Data Transfer than Gigabit Fiber Internet::A decade ago, a pigeon with a 4 GB memory stick outran an ISP’s ADSL service. A 2023 rematch features a bird with 3 TB of flash drives vs gigabit internet.
“Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of magnetic tapes hurtling down the highway”
Interestingly enough NASA still sends data this way. Huge HDD delivered by hand. Not all data, but I remember reading about some satellite images and similar data where latency doesn’t matter. Can’t beat good old box full of HDD.
yep, radio telescopes send data this way, thats how SETI@home got the Arecibo data
I wondered why NASA was using pigeons till I read the rest of your comment.
It was 10 years ago so I don’t know what is the practice now but the “offsite backup” solution in my office was taking a hard drive to a safe at the local bank.
Every week someone would go to the bank to switch the drive that is stored there.
Huh, I fully expected the link to be a hard drive article
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I’m not the original author:
Trebuchets are the most technologically advanced siege engines of all time, and are capable of hurling a 90kg stone over 300m using a counterweight.
With this in mind, we can perform the following calculations:
A 22TB WD Red Pro drive weighs 670g, with a maximum hurl weight of 90kg, trebuchet can hurl 134 drives at once, totalling 2,948 TB of data.
The average speed of a trebuchet projectile is 54m/s and the average size of an American ‘block’ is 100m. Lets presume 3 blocks to get our full trebuchets use (fuck you catapults).
It’ll take 5.5 seconds for the projectile to go from launch to dramatic landing, meaning a throughput of 536TB a second.
Therefore, trebuchets are the best transfer method.
All of these methods have extreme bandwidth but terrible latency and packet loss.
Just use half the bandwidth for redundancy.
You’ve heard of RAID but have you ever tried SEIGE?
I’m sorry for those HDDs
If you use Western Digital, the HDDs won’t notice the extreme transfer method. They’ll be unreadable either way
At this point why not get a 30 ton truck to carry all those WD Red Pros? Sure you can only go 5.4 m/s but the carrying capacity is much greater!
techcrunch.com/…/amazon-will-truck-your-massive-p…
100 petabytes in a truck from 2016
In a real world scenario this would need to account for protection to the storage devices to prevent damage and potential loss of data from damage
Haha, in some parts of germany you can do that yourself. on foot. with a zipdisk.
Good ole sneakernet. It’s hard to have dropped packets when they’re delivered by hand
It’s not. Just drop the storage device in a manhole, or get mugged, or break it in some way. Also when you do so, pretty much all packets are lost and to retransmit you need to go back to the point of origin and make a new copy, assuming you still have the original.
Can’t help but think that they are rigging this for the bird. Just calculate how long it takes the bird to get from here to there and then pick a capacity that takes longer to download.
That’s kind of the point though. It’s not about practicalities.
There is an ancient proverb.
“Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of floppy disks.”
Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes hurtling down the highway. –Andrew Tanenbaum, 1981
There are no winners or losers here and they are not suggesting you start uploading things via pigeons, just gives a more interesting way to talk about and get people to think about how large volumes of data can and are still moved around via trucks and ships.
Yes and no.
If you could put a 1 petabyte flash drive on a pigeon, it would easily crush the gigabit internet
Does a 1 petabyte flash drive exist? Could it exist?
They put 3 stripped-down terabyte flash drives on the pigeon. Could it carry more weight?
You get to the point where the pigeon can’t carry the weight.
All this is saying that sending data by pigeon can be faster and using 3 tb sticks proves it.
If it needed to be 4 tb, then they would have had to use 4 sticks. If it couldn’t carry 4 sticks, then you have your answer that the pigeon can’t do it with current technology.
We need to RAID pigeons in vase of hawk outage.
More redundancy!
you’re saying that a 12-ounce bird can carry no more than three flash drives?
See also IP over Avian Carriers - Wikipedia
also the followup: IP over Avian Carriers with Quality of Service
its like they choose 3 TB because they knew it was the smallest amount that would lose. lets make it a real re-match and go back to transfering 4 GB.
In that case: Time appropiate storage size.
i guess im confused why 3 TB was chossen. what is this representing. Most people are not transfering 3 TB on a regular basis, 100 GB is a large transfer for common cases. who is this information for? who should be looking into pigeons/jets for regular multi-TB data transfers. just sounds like pigeon propaganda to me.
Never underestimate the bandwidth of a truck full of flash drives. The latency’s most annoying though.
The ever lasting war between bandwidth and latancy
Lag is a real bitch though…
Yea, and packet size is enormous, so one lost packet is catastrophic…
This is why you use TCP: Trusted Concurrent Pigeons.
Trusted Pigeons so that a simple hash check can prove the veracity of your data AND provide a free dedupe / data integrity check for when multiple/single packets arrive.
Concurrent Pigeons so that transmission issues don’t impact latency (throughput is essentially unlimited here, assuming sufficient pigeons)
Downsides include needing to implement a pigeon cache and power (birdfood) requirement increases.
Telnet sucks bad with Pigeonet
I really have to fight the neck beard in me to not aKchutually the shit out of fun stuff like this.
It’s a classic example in education to demonstrate the difference between bandwidth and latency. Extremely high bandwidth, but also extremely high latency.
Yeah, this is super dumb. It’s too dumb for me to akchually it though.
Jokes aside, but you also have to upload & download data from portable storage.
He included those transfers as well. He used usb sticks with an actual SSD chip, since those are faster to read/write from.
This reminds me of the age when the egregiousness of home Internet data overage charges in Canada reached their zenith, with some back of the napkin math, I realized it would be more cost effectuvd to buy and fill a solid state drive (which had only begun to come down in price) with stuff, ship it overnight international, and then destroy it after downloading its contents, than to hit the overage charge limit with my provider.
I can’t remember who (probably all of them) but one of the fang companies offers a service where they’ll send you a truck with a huge backup server in a shipping container to do an on site backup to drive back to their cloud servers (for similar reasons.)
Amazon snowmobile it’s called. Let’s you uoad to s3 that way.
When can I start using a pigeon to preload games like Starfield?
Used to be called “install disks” that you would have to preorder for the convenience of having it available at your local game store
The pigeons struggled flying and landing with the discs
I’d like to see that pigeon fly from Sydney to New York.
I wouldn’t. Sounds boring.
Get back to me when a pigeon can deliver high-speed porn.
it already can, multiple terabytes at once
But that latency is just too high.
Is the time of loading and downloading the files from the flash drives of the pigeon included?
Yes it was. Though he did use faster SSD drives rather then cheaper and slower flash drives. Which is something reasonable to do IMO. He also tested various network transfer methods to use the fastest one and transferred unique data to each drive rather then just uploading the same file over and over giving both sides a fair but also their best shot at working.
The pigeon is the flash drive and has a much higher transfer rate than a commercial flash drive.
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Good bot
Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes flashdrives hurtling down the highway.
For price per TB, modern tapes might still be a valid choice actually. But maybe not great for read/write performance. I guess that depends on how many tape drives you have on each end.
I can carry way more HDDs than that weakass stupid pigeon.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Popular TechTuber Jeff Geerling has delivered an updated take on the old chestnut about the relative merits of pigeon-based vs internet data transfers.
Spoiler alert: the pigeon with its high-capacity microSD cards won Geerling’s data transfer race by a significant margin.
Famously, in 2009, a South African company compared the transfer speed of a pigeon carrying a 4 GB memory stick vs local ISP Telkom’s ADSL service.
So, he donned a pigeon mask and jumped on a plane to carry 3 TB of files from his home in the US to the Canadian data center, which the internet transfer also targeted.
To conclude, Geerling says he could have easily done better as PiJeff, stuffing his luggage with very high capacity drives, but wanted to stick to the common 3 TB across all alternatives.
Hopefully, another decade later, we will all have broadband measured in petabits, and pigeons won’t have to endure having flash NAND devices strapped to their legs for our amusement (research).
The original article contains 432 words, the summary contains 163 words. Saved 62%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
I’m reminded of this: what-if.xkcd.com/31/
I was looking for this comment just to post:
Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes hurtling down the highway. –Andrew Tanenbaum, 1981
I wish that pigeon can send me approximately 3000 pictures of the Atomium
That’s specific
It’s for irony sake
A single packet takes longer to reach the destination, but that single packet can contain shittons of data. Ingenious!
Packet loss is a pretty major risk with IPoAC.
What’s the ping on that bird?
Yes but not as safe and not as reliable, also not viable over long distances. Furthermore its a one directional transfer.
did it count the time to load the data onto the hdd and unload it at the other side?
how much time would it take to move 3tb onto a usb3 hdd?
I was lucky enough to have 2Gb fiber introduced to my area recently - I have to say I rarely notice meaningful differences over my lowest tier cable connection. I pull 1400Mbs on router based tests, but routine endpoint speed tests are 300-700 range. Was 30 on prior connection. Can run more stuff all at once, but still get occasional streaming delays, 5min of low resolution streams, routine downloads are about the same. Now that Mullvad has dropped port forwarding, this pigeon system is sounding pretty attractive.
very variable
Who doubted that sneakernet wouldn’t be faster?
dual_sport_dork@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Yeah, but having that ping time of 36,000,000ms really kind of sucks.
Tar_alcaran@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Error-correction for dropped packets is also pretty shit.
Rocketpoweredgorilla@lemmy.ca 1 year ago
oh, that’s what’s on my car.