Matt’s post over at Standalone Sysadmin about flash drives as archival media made me remember conversations I used to have with coworkers about the bandwidth of the U.S. Postal Service, a colleague’s pickup truck loaded with tapes, etc. Sometimes the fastest way to get data to a location is to mail it, even now.
The late Jim Gray had a fantastic interview in ACM Queue back in 2003 where he talked about disk access times vs. capacity vs. Moore’s Law, and especially how he was mailing computers and disks to people. His price comparisons are a little dated now, but the rest is a good use of ten minutes, if you ask me. (and you didn’t, I know). :-)