I decided to run a quick test to see what difference in speed (i.e. time) we might see between handling files that are stored locally, on an external hard drive (HDD), or on our server (Owl).
This isn’t tightly controlled because it’s possible that other people were using resources on the server, thus slowing things down. However, this situation would be a true real world experience, so it is probably an accurate representation of what we’d experience on a daily basis.
https://github.com/sr320/LabDocs/blob/master/jupyter_nbs/sam/20160427_speed_comparison.ipynb