It's always been true, depending on how you interpret it. At any given point of time over the lifetime of the internet, there was always more bandwidth in packing a car full of the prevailing storage technology than in using the network. Over time, tape/drive capacities have increased, just as network speeds have, but I don't think was ever a point where the network was faster.
Also, it's probably still true, using the latest LTO tapes.
Do any of these theoreticals account for filling the storage media with data at the source, or ingesting it at the destination?
Yes a container of tapes is a lot of data, but how long would that reasonably take to write to tape? How many tape drives could you realistically have attached to the host system ?
· Start with an 80-slot 6U form-factor Base Library Module, and add up to 6 Expansion Library Modules for a total of 560 slots in a 42U rack form factor
· 25.2PB of total maximum compressed capacity with 560 slots and LTO-9 drives
· Performance scaling from 1 to 42 LTO HH Tape Drives and transfer rates of 300 MB/s per LTO-9 Tape Drive.
It's especially ludicrous if you contemplate the microSD card. You can theoretically put 10+ exabytes in a car now. Driving that even across the country is like 100 TBps.
https://www.reddit.com/r/mildlyinteresting/comments/20jlv3/n...