Moving large amounts of data

[Unique]

The way I read this it seems all he did was physically removed the 10 'hot swappable' 1TB drives from one machine and installed them into another, thus moving 10TB of data in 5 minutes. To go quicker would be to use less hard drives.

that's the way i see it. it says "moving large amounts of data", not copying. he just pulled the drives out and stuck them in another computer. 1 minute to pull them out, 2 minutes to stick back in and a couple of minutes for them to show up as active. or something like that

copying would have taken much longer even with the fastest drives and tech

[oolon]

If the solution is whipping the disks out and putting them in a new machine, I think either the question is only a small part of an over all problem, and if we had the overall problem there might be other interesting solutions. Moving data is not about physically relocating it. Moving data is about having the information running on one machine transferred to another machine. Its the over all time this task takes that is important, not how fast hotswapped can be pulled and thrown into another machine. Most machines do not access hot swap drives being added on the fly (unless they are blanks)... etc. In the real world we have to see what the machine are and what the budget is and lots of other variables etc. As someone who has done a number of data centre moves, I find the question annoying unthought out, and example of academics at their best, who has a pet solution so sets a narrow framework so it wins. How long would his solution have taken if the other machine was on the other side of the world.... How long can systems be unavailable etc. I did a complete server rebuild in 4 hours once, using the "orginal" disks, the main issue there was the kernel was not compatible with the new hardware... so nothing to do with the seconds it too to move a few drives.

[Lucio]

Well, it sounds like a lesson in how IT types tend to over-complicate the question when presented with less than the needed information.

[Funkstar]

I could probably do it in less with the hot swap cages I have connected to PERC RAID cards. The drives appear in the management software a lot quicker than they usually do when connected to the motherboard for Windows to detect itself


In fact, bugger that. I can do it in just over a second or two.

Pick up PC, move it, put it down.

10TB moved and you don't even have to switch it off!!!

[Unique]

I could probably do it in less with the hot swap cages I have connected to PERC RAID cards. The drives appear in the management software a lot quicker than they usually do when connected to the motherboard for Windows to detect itself


In fact, bugger that. I can do it in just over a second or two.

Pick up PC, move it, put it down.

10TB moved and you don't even have to switch it off!!!

i did think of that too. just pick the computer up, but then that would have made it more of a trick question and i don't suppose tutors are there to wind students up

[kalniel]

and i don't suppose tutors are there to wind students up

Hahahhahahaaaaa

[Funkstar]

Most lecturers take great delight in winding students up.

[Fraz]

In particle physics we are pretty much the world-wide experts at shipping large volumes of data about. Obviously we don't actually transport it physically, but there really is little out there that can compete with a PhD student with a backpack full of disk or tape and a nearby airport. Bandwidth is amazing. Shame about the latency though...

[kalniel]

In particle physics we are pretty much the world-wide experts at shipping large volumes of data about.

I know.. they're always smug when we bioinformaticians complain about our data growth.