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That's a riff on Tanenbaum:

"Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes hurtling down the highway."

https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Andrew_S._Tanenbaum

Depends on distance, other side of the planet is less than 0.2Mbps.

I was thinking that everyone every 2 miles would send a drive at the same time.

All to me? Can they use 8TB drives instead?

One of the last interviews I saw by Jim Gray mentioned shipping around astronomical data sets in big boxes of hard drives. At that time, they were more likely in the 10GB range than 1TB.

As recently at 2000, major astronomical surveys (SDSS, York et al. 2000) would ship harddrives daily "via express courier" from the scopes to the processing computers.

That's the most recent I can think of. Although some surveys (2MASS) still offer data delivery "on a set of DVDs" if you can't handle FTP.

But the ping is terrible.

Over what distance?

Trade off between (physical space = delivery cost, ping) and bandwidth. A suit case can easily fit 20 1TB drives. A 20 hour journey from Sydney to London, would mean a transfer rate of 1TB per hour, or 2000+ megabits per second, or 300x faster than the internet in my own home. Even carrying only 1 terabyte over 20 hours is a decent 111 megabits/second.