Re: [TCLUG:15037] Station Wagon Full of Tapes

["Carl Wilhelm Soderstrom" <carls@agritech.com>]

>>         the accompanying paragraph talks about moving 1000 7GB tapes (or in
>> today's terms; 100 70GB tapes) by Fed-Ex, in 24 hours. this gives a
>> bandwidth of 648Gbps. :)
>
>Er, you must have a NASA(tm) brand calculator..  Mine says 0.648Gbps, or
>~648Mbps.. (unless I'm totally off my rocker..)

well, here's the whole paragraph...

        A simple calculation will make this point clear. An industry
standard 8mm video tape (e.g. Exabyte) can hold 7 Gigabytes. a box 50x50x50
cm can hold about 1000 of these tapes, for a total capacity of 7000
Gigabytes. A box of tapes can be delivered anywhere in the US in 24 hours by
Federal Express and other companies. The effective bandwidth of this
transmission is 56,000 gigabits/86400 sec or 648 Gbps, which is 1000 times
better than the high-speed version of ATM (622 Mbps). If the destination if
only an hour away by road, the bandwidth is increased to over 15Gbps.
                        -- A. Tanenbaum, "Computer Networks, Third Edition"

but yeah, I think you're right... I calculate 56000Gb/86400s=~0.648Gbps. 

of course, my math skills are questionable... I can't count above 1. (but I
start at 0!) ;>

Carl Soderstrom        
System Administrator    307 Brighton Ave. 
Minnesota DHIA	        Buffalo, MN	
carls@agritech.com      (612) 682-1091