[cat9]

The best solution depends entirely on your optimization conditions.

If transaction time is important, hard drives are high bandwidth. Ten 1TB hard drives are $500. Two 6TB hard drives are also $500, but you have fewer drives to worry about shipping. Five 2TB hard drives are about $370, if drive price is more important. Using ten 1TB drives is only best if we're optimizing for load / unload time and have that degree of parallelism in the pipeline. Otherwise, one of the other two will be better, depending on price sensitivity vs. other factors.

If it's not as time-sensitive, something like BitTorrent Sync will get the job done. This doesn't require shipments, additional hardware, or mucking about with hardware at either end, so it's very nice if "get it there ASAP" isn't a constraint.

Regardless, don't ship the only copy.

[stkim1]

Thanks for the concise summary.