When I recently downloaded 25GB of laserdisc arcade ROMs, I found myself with an arcade machine hard drive that was rapidly becoming full. In addition to the massive quantity of arcade data (>200GB), the drive also stores my entire MP3 collection (>60GB). Rather than trying to figure out what to get rid of... I figured, why not just buy a bunch more space. The original drive in there was a 300GB device. I just installed a new Seagate 750GB monster, giving me my first ever terabyte machine.
1.05TB
Anyway, so let's say you filled a semi trailer (48' long x 8.5' wide x 8' tall = 3264 cubic feet) with 750GB harddrives (1" x 4" x 5.78" = 23.12 cubic inches = 0.0134 cubic feet). You would, of course, require 243,582 drives, for a total storage capacity of 182,686.5 terabytes.
Now, let's say you drove the semi from New York to San Francisco (4,670 km via the I-80 route) at the Google Maps estimated rate, making the trip in 48 hours of driving. Of course, you'd be obeying 49 CFR part 395 and only driving 11 hours per day, meaning that you would arrive in San Francisco exactly 100 hours after you left.
Your information bandwidth would therefore be 182,685.5 TB/100 hours or...
558 gigabytes per second
The moral of this story is... if you've got a lot of data to move, it's probably faster to use sneakernet (or seminet, depending on your needs) than the internet. The other moral is that my arcade machine is teh sw33tz.
The guys in T-6 (Theoretical Astro, for those not in the 87545 ZIP code) are pretty up to date on generating and moving massive amounts of data. Last time I asked Mike Warren about this, he said they share data with coworkers at UA (Arizona) via 250GB drives, care of FedEx. Overnight with insurance is in the $20-$50 range... which turns out to be cheaper than buying the bandwidth to blitz a terabyte of data over fiber. Not to mention faster.
Didn't realize they made 750GB disks now. Which means I could update my RAID array to over 2TB now. Damn.
Weight. Each of these drives is around 1.5 pounds, which means that you're looking to haul ~360,000 pounds of porn, err...bits. The most you'll get on a single trailer is around 100,000 pounds.
I had to factor this in the last time I did this calculation (probably...five years ago now) and added some buffer space because clearly, I wouldn't want to make a stack of hard drives 8' tall without at least protecting the one at the bottom.
It may amuse you to know that Hitach is predicting we'll crack the 1TB mark in the 3.5" form factor by the end of the year.