So I use SmugMug to host my photos as they have some really cool features and people there. I also started following a few of them on Twitter, and there was a tweet that just made my head hurt, so I sat down to do the math on it. Okay, I also used Wolfram Alpha to help with it.
The Tweet from Baldy stated:
“Whoa! Vincent LaForet’s new Canon Mark IV vid on SmugMug used over 20 terabytes of bandwidth in 300,000 views in 14 hours.”
So I started to try and figure out how many megabits/second that was so I could compare it to typical network connectivity that I am more familiar with, 100BaseT or Fast Ethernet, and Gigabit Ethernet. Well it just became amazing.
- First I converted 20TB to megabits
- 20TB= 20,000,000,000,000 bytes = 160,000,000,000,000 bits =
160,000,000 megabits.
Yes, that is 160 Billion megabits
- 20TB= 20,000,000,000,000 bytes = 160,000,000,000,000 bits =
- The next thing was to convert hours to seconds
- 14 hours = 840 minutes = 50,400 seconds
- Now to convert to megabits/second
- 160,000,000 megabits/50,400 seconds = 3,174 megabits/second = 3.2 gigabits/second.
So that is pretty freaking fast at to how quickly the data is coming out.
Wolfram Alpha had cool comparisons to put it in context. It is approximately equal to the text content of the Library of Congress. It is approximately equal to 1/8th of the estimated data content of the surface web (~~ 170 TB ).
Dang no wonder they are in need of 2 TB of flash memory for a server. You can see the picture and Don MacAskill CEO of SmugMug here http://bit.ly/3HlXzH
At times I have trouble keeping track of what is where in terms of data. A couple of friends recommended Dropbox to me, so I finally checked it out and am amazed at how fast and powerful it is so far. By using the links to Dropbox with a referral code (the ones on this page) in it that gives us both an additional 250MB of storage on top of the free 2GB of storage. So I figured I would try it out today as a simple test of features by doing the following and was amazed.
- I downloaded (very small installers) and installed the client on both my Windows and Mac computers
- On my Windows machine I copied over four PDFs for my trip to AES this weekend (I am sitting on a panel and a technical council)
- They appeared within about 30 seconds on my Mac machine
- On my Mac machine I renamed the files
- The updates appeared in about 15 seconds on the Windows machine
- I did not have to do a forced sync or anything, it just occurred in the background and worked great.
It was so easy I am thinking of using a bigger size that has a subscription fee and using it for more stuff. The interface is very easy, it was a very simple setup, it was done right. I am going to try the sharing next (even though I have my own FTP server I figure this could be faster and easier at times)
I also found that I could share the directory Dropbox on my Mac to the VMWare Fusion instance of Windows, copy the files I needed over, and voila they got synced. So now when I need my copy of Star*Explorer for uploading photos to SmugMug while I travel, it is easily available.