Camera: Apple iPhone 16 Pro
Exposure: 1/2703
Aperture: f/1.78
Focal Length: 24mm equivalent
ISO: 80
How long does it take to drive 400TB of data across the country?
We don’t often think about the physicality of data. We think of data as virtual. That data has no mass or no weight to it as things which are not quite real are weightless. Data is an abstraction of reality.
When we read or write data, we either spin magnetic discs and move magnets over the surface of the discs or rewrite binary ones in zeros to transistor states This is where data interface is with the real world electrons move around.
And when we move data from one point to another on planet earth we’re not actually moving data you’re sending instructions from one system that has data stored on it to another system to copy that data to duplicate that data to create the same wright functions that happened when the data was stored in its original location and state. It turns out that takes time. And for large amounts of data, it can actually be faster to physically move the data from one location on planet earth to another.
It turns out that I had to move about 400TB of data from Salt Lake City to Pittsburgh pretty much as fast as I could make the journey, hauling 3 servers that are critical for our retinal connectomics infrastructure. So, I packed these servers and their hard drives in separate containers into my little Porsche Cayman and moved them across the country as fast as possible.
I-80 across America is a bit of a monotonous drive. It is wide open spaces, and largely boring. But can be driven through the West at least at pretty quick speeds. I decided this trip to avoid tolls and duck down to I-70 which was an incredibly rough ride from Indianapolis to the Ohio state line as the freeway is in dangerously poor condition. I think the Cayman actually caught air on one bridge expansion joint, and the suspension got a tremendous workout. But the servers arrived safely and are currently installed in their new location, along with the Cayman being parked in its new home.
Because this trip was so incredibly tight with a 2 day drive from Salt Lake City, Utah to Des Moins, Iowa on the first day and Des Moins to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania on the 2nd day, I really did not have time for photography which was sad. That said, I was formulating some longer form thoughts on the journey over and I’ll be making the journey again, but with a slower pace and cameras in the near future. Edit: A slower, more relaxed trip did not happen.
Update: My dear friend Duncan put some numbers behind the bandwidth to this trip: “The napkin math on his trip — assuming 36 hours door-to-door, including 26 hours of drive time at legalish speeds and a bare minimum needed for rest and refueling both man and machine — puts his trip’s bandwidth at about 25 Gbps. If he could have fully utilized a 1 Gbps connection full-time, it would have taken 37 days to copy the data over the internet…. It’s amazing that, even in 2025, the largest of data migrations are still well served by four wheels and a lot of hard drives. Bonus points if it’s a Porsche.”
A little movie I made starting out the journey, just above with some screen caps of the road from the journey below.
