I’ve long enjoyed Andrew Tanenbaum’s 1985 quip: “Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes hurtling down the highway.” It was top of mind five years ago when Dr. Ian McDonald and I helped Wayve get set up with Azure Data Box Disk as a solution for getting massive volumes of telemetry from their self-driving car testbeds into the cloud for machine learning model training. Our napkin math showed they needed 100x more bandwidth than they had available, even with a fiber link in their office. Shipping disks easily won, despite the latency.

My dear friend Bryan Jones recently lived this adage again when he moved 400TB of his science lab’s data across the country over two days in his Porsche Cayman. The napkin math on his trip — assuming 36 hours door-to-door, including 26 hours of drive time at legalish speeds and a bare minimum needed for rest and refueling both man and machine — puts his trip’s bandwidth at about 25 Gbps. If he could have fully utilized a 1 Gbps connection full-time, it would have taken 37 days to copy the data over the internet.

It’s amazing that, even in 2025, the largest of data migrations are still well served by four wheels and a lot of hard drives. Bonus points if it’s a Porsche.