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Originally Posted by Botnst
Whoa. That's just like us, if you allow for the 7 orders of magnitude differences in budgets.
We're up to serving 7 TB and will double that by year's end. Last fall (when I asked you about this) we projected 4 TB would be needed by year's end. Our LAN is completely replaced with fiber bundles. I don't know anything about that stuff but it is noticeably faster and much less prone to crashing. Even so, we often use 1/2 TB drives to transfer data. It's faster to walk a large format hard drive to another office than it is to send it over the network.
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Are the offices you work in spread out over several buildings? My experience with fiber optic is limited to one installation. There it was used to inter-connect different buildings. Code demands a non conductive media be used to stop differences in grounding between buildings.
Do you know the bandwidth of your network? The fiber backbone connections used by phone companies are up to about 95 gb, where a high speed lan is 1 gb and most office LANs are 100 mb. For the sake of comparison, a modern high speed T1 line used mostly for internet connections is about 1.5 mb, and a dial up line is about 44kb to 56 kb. Because you’re walking the drive between, what I guess are close locations, it implies that the LAN isn’t gb or is maybe saturated and that’s why it’s quicker to walk it than transfer it…(?)
Back to storage and the reason for needing ever more bandwidth in the first place. Despite the compact size of the TB boxes now a days, it can take a long time to get data on and off the drive. USB 2.0 high-speed, which is the current state of the art, pegs at 480 mb. I vaguely recall seeing a reference to a USB 3 spec, which will be called wireless USB or WUSB. This next spec, estimated to hit the streets around ’10 will offer about a gb of throughput. At this rate, by 2010 there will likely be 100 TB drives that take about the same space as a 1 TB drive does now. Incredible! Yet it will still be intolerable if folks are storing and sorting through 100 TB of info, or more with a mere gb of throughput…..