In several senses.

I can’t remember now how I ran across this — it was four or five hops from Brad deLong’s journal — but it’s interesting: an interview with Jim Gray, head of Microsoft’s Bay Area Research Group, on the future of storage. Apparently our ability to cram data onto hard disks is increasing ten times faster than our ability to actually access that data — and that’s only talking about disk hardware, never mind higher-level issues of organization and indexing and whatnot.

Certainly we have to convert from random disk access to sequential [i.e., tape-like, if you remember tape] access patterns. Disks will give you 200 accesses per second, so if you read a few kilobytes in each access, you’re in the megabyte-per-second realm, and it will take a year to read a 20-terabyte disk. . . .

On the [other] hand, these disks offer many opportunities. You can have a file where all the old versions are saved. The unused part of the disk can be used as tape or as archive. That’s already happening with people making snapshots of the disk every night and offering a version of the file system as of yesterday or as of a certain point in time. They can do that by exploiting the disk’s huge capacity.

Okay, that part’s probably only of interest to programmers. But the present is already weird enough: terabyte-scale SneakerNet.

I’ve been working with a bunch of astronomers lately and we need to send around huge databases. I started writing my databases to disk and mailing the disks. . . .

So lately I’m sending complete computers. We're now into the 2-terabyte realm, so we can't actually send a single disk; we need to send a bunch of disks. It’s convenient to send them packaged inside a metal box that just happens to have a processor in it. I know this sounds crazy — but you get an NFS or CIFS server and most people can just plug the thing into the wall and into the network and then copy the data.

I’ll have to work that idea into the space opera. One of the premises of the space opera is that (at least in one of its civilizations) interstellar communication is FTL, but expensive, while interstellar travel is STL and also expensive. Yottabyte-scale SneakerNet might grow the market for space travel, and give my interstellar civilization more of an excuse to exist. (Though it begs the question of why they don’t just send the data by radio. . .  I can come up with socioeconomic reasons for that, but I’d rather have an engineering reason.)

A final note, with some fun possibilities:

Of course, this is the ultimate virus.

In the old days, when people brought floppy disks around, that was the standard way of communicating viruses among computers. Now, here I am mailing a complete computer into your data center. My virus can do wonderful things. This computer is now inside your firewall, on your network.

Of course, the state of the art on that is still (going on two decades later) Vernor Vinge’s A Fire Upon The Deep, with its sentient network packets.