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Comment by moralestapia | Hacker News Reader

I'm confused, I assumed we were talking about the network layer.

If we are talking about storage, well, SATA can't give you more than ~5Gbps so I guess the answer is no? But also no one else can do it, unless they're using super exotic HDD tech (hint: they're not, it's actually the opposite).

What a weird thing to argue about, btw, literally everybody is running a network layer on top of storage that lets you have much higher throughput. When one talks about R2/S3 throughput no one (on my circle, ofc.) would think we are referring to the speed of their HDDs, lmao. But it's nice to see this, it's always amusing to stumble upon people with a wildly different point of view on things.

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We're talking about the user-visible behavior. You argued that because Cloudflare's CDN has an obscene amount of bandwidth, R2 will be able to saturate user bandwidth; that doesn't follow, hence my counterpoint that it could be bottlenecked on storage rather than network. The question at hand is what performance R2 offers, and that hasn't been answered.

There are any number of ways they could implement R2 that would allow it to run at full wire speed, but S3 doesn't run at full wire speed by default (unless you make many parallel requests) and I'd be surprised if R2 does.

n = 1 aside.

I have some large files stored in R2 and a 50Gbps interface to the world.

curl to Linode's speed test is ~200MB/sec.

curl to R2 is also ~200MB/sec.

I'm only getting 1Gbps but given that Linode's speed is pretty much the same I would think the bottleneck is somewhere else. Dually, R2 gives you at least 1Gbps.

No, most people aren’t interested in subcomponent performance, just in total performance. A trivial example is that even a 4-striped U2 NVMe disk array exported over Ethernet can deliver a lot more data than 5 Gbps and store mucho TiB.

Thanks for +1 what I just said. So, apparently, it's not just me and my peers who think like this.

That comment didn't +1 what you just said. It basically said that we care about the total, usable throughput. Whether some specific components are capable of more doesn't mean anything unless / until that greather throughput is usable by us.

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