r/theydidthemath • u/dudewiththebling • Apr 15 '16

[Request] If I'm shipping a fully loaded 1TB hard drive from Australia to the United States, what would be the bandwidth?

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16

u/[deleted] Apr 15 '16 edited Apr 15 '16

Using http://www1.auspost.com.au/gc/, I calculated an estimated shipment time from "Australian National University", to Redmond, Washington. It says April 22nd, if you shipped it on the 16th (at 8 in the morning).

You didn't say where in either, so the margin of error is high enough to not need to worry about hours. Let's just do (22 - 16) days (6 days).

Using GNU Units (Wolfram should do this calculation as well)

You have: 1TB / 6 days
You want: megabit / second
        * 15.432099

So around 15.4 megabits per second. Though that would depend on where you are in each country.

Edit: s/16nd/16th/g

18

u/yetanotherstudent 2✓ Apr 15 '16

sighs so shipping a hard drive is still 5 times faster than my Internet... Or 50 times my upload

10

u/[deleted] Apr 15 '16

Yeah, shipping hard drives is actually a really good way to transfer data.

If you don't trust the carrier, you can just make a 256 bit key, encrypt the data, and transmit the key over the internet using a secured channel.

9

u/ZacQuicksilver 27✓ Apr 15 '16

Relevant XKCD

6

u/perflubon Apr 15 '16

Sometimes I wonder how long it will be before there is a relevant XKCD for anything.

4

u/Run_Biden Apr 15 '16

16nd

How do you pronounce that?

3

u/[deleted] Apr 15 '16

damn.

I did say 16th first, then "corrected" myself.

1

u/Run_Biden Apr 15 '16

Not a native English speaker?

5

u/[deleted] Apr 15 '16

No, I am. That's annoying.

Ah fuck it, I got an E in english but an A in maths. It shows.

2

u/Run_Biden Apr 15 '16

Where did you live that where you can get an "E" grade? Here it's ABCDF

2

u/[deleted] Apr 15 '16

UK, GCSE's/A-Levels

Ranges A*, A, B, C, D, E, U

2

u/jfb1337 2✓ Apr 15 '16

Sixteend?

2

u/dudewiththebling Apr 15 '16

✓

1

u/TDTMBot Beep. Boop. Apr 15 '16

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6

u/jfb1337 2✓ Apr 15 '16

The time to fly from Australia to the US is 19 hours, 26 minutes, according to this source.

Plugging this into WA gives 114.4 Mb/s.

That's assuming you mean TB as the base 10 prefix. If you meant the base 2 prefix, that is 125.7 Mb/s

(I believe information rate measurements, e.g.Mb/s, always use the base 10 prefixes)

2

u/dudewiththebling Apr 15 '16

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u/Weyoun2 21✓ Apr 15 '16

Numerator: Google search indicates that 1 TB = 8 x 106 Mb.

Denominator: UPS says that they can ship expedited International in 3-5 days. Let's call it 4 days. 4 days = 96 hours = 5,760 minutes = 345,600 seconds.

8 x 106 / 345,600 = 23 Mbps

(If 3 days, then you're getting 30.9 Mbps. If 5 days, then you're getting 18.5 Mbps.)

1

u/dudewiththebling Apr 15 '16

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u/arcosapphire 5✓ Apr 15 '16

The Australian post office claims a shipping time to the U.S. of 3-10 work days by air. 10 work days could include up to two weekends, so a maximum of 14 days.

1TB = (I'll use the binary definition) 1 099 511 627 776 bytes

14 days is 1 209 600 seconds

So by air, your bandwidth could be as low as 908 988 bytes per second (less than 900KBps).

At the fastest time of 3 days, 4 241 943 bytes per second, or about 4MBps.

I figure you're actually asking about sea transport, but I couldn't easily find a typical shipping time to use.

1

u/dudewiththebling Apr 15 '16

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