Comment by cmrdporcupine
3 years ago
Speed of light is a hard physical limit. Local storage will always have a major edge for this reason alone.
That said I'm now in this weird mid-life confusion about the fact that my new WAN (3gbps fiber connection) is now faster than any reasonable home LAN I can set up. Needed to move some movies from one machine to another the other day and it was way faster to just bittorrent them again from upstream than actually copy, since even USB removable media was slower than my WAN. So I think we might be at least temporarily in an awkward situation where cloud storage outcompetes LAN storage.
But truly local storage (nVME etc) has an extreme edge over anything networked, and always will.
This doesn't make any sense to me, I must be missing something. If your WAN is 3Gb/s, and you LAN is less than that, how does pulling things to a local machine, presumably on the LAN and therefore limited to the LAN speed, end up being faster?
The machine doing the torrenting is tied directly to the access point, everything else is over wifi.
> The machine doing the torrenting is tied directly to the access point, everything else is over wifi.
That still doesn't make it faster to just torrent them again.
If the LAN is slower than the WAN then a large file where the transfer time is long enough that the few milliseconds of setup latency is irrelevant might be effectively equally fast to re-download from than to transfer over the LAN, but never faster, and in most cases the LAN is going to be more reliable.
There are almost certainly some cases where BitTorrent can transfer a specific set of files faster than common LAN transfer protocols, especially FTP or older versions of SMB when faced with large collections of small files, but that's an entirely different matter.
If the bottleneck in either case is the second PC's LAN interface how could the WAN possibly be a faster source than the LAN machine?
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>But truly local storage (nVME etc) has an extreme edge over anything networked, and always will.
Sure, for specific usecases that don't much resemble what most people spend their time doing.