Never Underestimate the Bandwidth of a Station Wagon Full of Hard Drives

There’s an old saying in computing—often attributed to Andrew Tanenbaum—that you should “never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes hurtling down the highway.” The modern version uses hard drives, and the math still checks out beautifully.

Say you need to move a petabyte of data to another location. You could transmit it over a beefy 10 Gbps corporate internet connection. At that speed, assuming you can actually saturate the link (you can’t, but let’s be generous), transferring 1 PB takes roughly 9.3 days. Around the clock. Maxing out a connection that costs tens of thousands of dollars per month.

Or you could load up a car. A single 20 TB hard drive weighs about a pound and costs a few hundred bucks. Fifty of them fit in a backpack—that’s your petabyte. Toss the backpack in the passenger seat, drive it across town in 30 minutes, and you’ve just achieved an effective transfer rate of roughly 4.4 petabits per second. That’s 440,000 times faster than your corporate fiber line. The sneakernet wins, and it’s not remotely close.

This is one of those cases where physical transport is so absurdly superior to the “modern” alternative that the comparison is almost embarrassing. Bulk physical movement of dense media beats electronic transmission by orders of magnitude when the volume is large enough. (AWS literally offers this as a service—look up the AWS Snowmobile, which is an actual 18-wheeler full of hard drives.)

Now hold that analogy in your head, because it maps perfectly onto an X post I saw recently about using trucks to move oil through Oman to bypass the Strait of Hormuz.

The station wagon full of hard drives? That’s the oil tanker. A single Very Large Crude Carrier hauls 2 million barrels of oil through the strait with a crew of 25, burning a fraction of a percent of its cargo in fuel. It’s the ultimate bulk mover—a lumbering, unglamorous vessel that wins on pure physics, the same way a backpack full of hard drives embarrasses a fiber line.

The corporate internet connection? That’s the fleet of 160,000 tanker trucks you’d need per day to match the strait’s throughput. It seems like a reasonable alternative. Trucks exist. Roads exist. Oman is right there on the map. Just route around the chokepoint, right? It’s the same intuition that makes people think “just upload it” before they’ve done the math on how long a petabyte takes over the wire.

The sneakernet lesson isn’t “physical transport always wins.” It’s that bulk transport at scale is brutally, almost comically efficient, and the thing that looks more flexible—whether it’s a fiber line or a highway full of trucks—gets absolutely demolished when you actually run the numbers.

Let me show you how demolished.

Let’s do the napkin math. And by “napkin” I mean “several napkins, increasingly crumpled and tear-stained.”

First, the Scale

The Strait of Hormuz handles roughly 20–21 million barrels of oil per day. That’s about 20% of the world’s petroleum supply, casually flowing through a waterway that’s 21 miles wide at its narrowest point.

A standard tanker truck carries about 130 barrels—roughly 5,500 gallons. So to match the strait’s daily throughput with trucks, you’d need approximately 160,000 truck trips per day.

That’s 6,600 trucks per hour. About 110 trucks per minute. Every minute of every hour of every day, forever. And that’s assuming perfect logistics—zero breakdowns, instant loading, no traffic, no driver fatigue, no sandstorms. You know, the normal state of affairs in the Omani desert.

The Route

The idea would be to load oil on the Persian Gulf (western) coast of Oman and truck it to the Gulf of Oman (eastern) coast, bypassing Hormuz entirely. Depending on where you put your terminals, you’re looking at roughly 300–400 miles through mountainous desert terrain. Not exactly I-75.

Oman’s road network, while decent for the region, was absolutely not designed for an unending caravan of 160,000 tanker trucks per day. You’d essentially need to build a dedicated multi-lane highway system from scratch—plus loading terminals, fuel depots, maintenance facilities, driver barracks, and probably a few new cities to house the workforce. The capital expenditure alone would be tens of billions of dollars before a single barrel moved.

The Energy Math (Where It Gets Truly Silly)

A loaded tanker truck gets maybe 4–6 MPG. Over a 350-mile desert route with hills, let’s call it 60–80 gallons of diesel per trip. For 160,000 daily trips, that’s roughly 10–13 million gallons of diesel per day just for the trucks.

That’s about 300,000 barrels of diesel equivalent—per day—just to move the oil. You’d be burning approximately 1.5% of the cargo in fuel costs, and that’s only the loaded leg. The trucks have to drive back empty too, so double the fuel. You’re now north of 2–3% of the oil you’re moving, consumed by the act of moving it.

For context, a Very Large Crude Carrier (VLCC) transiting the actual Strait of Hormuz burns about 0.05% of its cargo in fuel. We’ll get to that comparison in a moment, and it’s devastating.

Ships vs. Trucks: A Comparison That Shouldn’t Need to Exist

Let’s compare moving a single VLCC’s worth of oil—about 2 million barrels—by sea versus by truck.

By Ship (VLCC through Hormuz)

• Vessels needed: 1
• Crew: ~25 people
• Fuel consumed: ~1,000 barrels (100–200 tons of heavy fuel oil for a 1–2 day transit)
• Fuel-to-cargo ratio: ~0.05%
• Cost: Roughly $80,000–$160,000 in charter costs (at $20,000–$80,000/day rates)
• Per-barrel cost: ~$0.04–$0.08

By Truck (Overland through Oman)

• Trucks needed: ~15,400 trips
• Drivers: ~15,400 (per shift, one way)
• Fuel consumed: ~24,000 barrels of diesel
• Fuel-to-cargo ratio: ~1.2% (one way), ~2.4% round trip
• Cost: Roughly $11–16 million (at $2–3/mile for 350 miles × 15,400 trucks)
• Per-barrel cost: ~$5.50–$8.00

So the trucking option uses 24x more fuel and costs 70–100x more money than the ship—to move the same amount of oil. And you need 15,400 drivers instead of 25 sailors.

To match the full daily throughput of Hormuz (not just one ship, but all of them), you’d be looking at daily trucking costs of $110–240 million, or roughly $40–80 billion per year. The shipping costs for the same volume through the strait are maybe $1–2 million per day.

The Labor Problem

160,000 truck trips per day means you need somewhere in the range of 80,000–100,000 truck drivers working in shifts, plus mechanics, dispatchers, terminal operators, fuel station attendants, road maintenance crews, and support staff. Call it 120,000–150,000 workers.

Oman’s entire population is about 5 million people. You’d be proposing to create a trucking workforce that would be one of the largest single-purpose labor forces in the Middle East, dedicated entirely to driving back and forth across the desert. The recruitment challenge alone is staggering. Where do these people come from? Where do they live? Who feeds them?

The Road Destruction Problem

Heavy trucks destroy roads. This isn’t speculation—it’s physics. Road damage scales roughly with the fourth power of axle weight (this is sometimes called the “fourth power law” or the AASHTO road test finding). A fully loaded tanker truck does thousands of times more damage per pass than a passenger car.

At 160,000 heavy truck trips per day, you’d be grinding your brand-new highway system into gravel within months. The ongoing road maintenance costs would be enormous—potentially billions per year—on top of everything else.

What Actually Exists Instead

This is why pipeline bypass projects are taken seriously by actual energy strategists. The UAE’s Habshan-Fujairah pipeline can move about 1.5 million barrels per day, entirely bypassing the Strait of Hormuz. It cost about $3.3 billion to build. Saudi Arabia has east-west pipelines with similar strategic rationale.

Even these pipelines only cover a fraction of Hormuz traffic, but they represent the correct engineering response to the problem: move the liquid through a pipe using gravity and pumping stations, not through the desert in 160,000 individual containers attached to diesel engines.

A pipeline moves more oil per day than tens of thousands of trucks, uses a tiny fraction of the energy, requires minimal labor, and doesn’t destroy road infrastructure. It’s not even close.

Why Maritime Shipping Is Absurdly Efficient

The deeper lesson here is that maritime shipping is the most energy-efficient form of cargo transport humans have ever invented, measured by ton-miles per unit of fuel. This is why ~80% of global trade moves by ship. The physics just work: a massive hull displacing water has incredibly low friction relative to cargo weight, and scaling up a ship makes it more efficient, not less.

A VLCC carrying 2 million barrels of oil through the strait with a crew of 25 people burning 0.05% of its cargo in fuel is one of the most efficient logistics operations in human history. Proposing to replace it with trucks is like proposing to replace a hydroelectric dam with hamster wheels. You could do the math on the number of hamsters, but the answer is “too many hamsters.”

The Verdict

The X post was almost certainly tongue-in-cheek (at least I hope so), but it’s a fantastic illustration of something humans are bad at: intuiting scale.

We see trucks on the highway every day. We know trucks carry oil. The Strait of Hormuz is a line on a map. Oman is right there. How hard could it be?

The answer is: impossibly hard. The energy waste would be staggering. The cost would exceed the GDP of many countries. The labor force would rival a small nation. The infrastructure would need to be built from scratch and then continuously rebuilt. And at the end of all that effort, you’d still only be doing—badly and expensively—what a handful of ships do quietly every day.

Maritime shipping isn’t just a little better than trucking for this job. It’s playing a completely different game. The Strait of Hormuz isn’t a vulnerability because there’s no alternative route—there are pipelines for that. It’s a vulnerability because nothing else comes close to matching what ships do, and that efficiency is what the entire global energy economy is built on.

Remember the sneakernet: a station wagon full of hard drives demolishes a corporate fiber line because bulk physical transport at scale is absurdly efficient. An oil tanker is that station wagon. A fleet of trucks is that fiber line—the thing that seems like a reasonable alternative until you do the math and realize it’s off by two orders of magnitude.

The lesson of the sneakernet isn’t just a fun computing trivia fact. It’s a universal principle: never underestimate the efficiency of moving stuff in bulk. Whether it’s hard drives in a backpack or crude oil in a supertanker, the big dumb thing wins. Every time.

So no, you cannot truck your way around the Strait of Hormuz. The math is wonderfully, crushingly absurd, and I have the tear-stained napkins to prove it.