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Comment by stephengillie | Hacker News Reader

Would Dropbox, Google Drive, Skydrive, Amazon cloud storage, et al exist today if we could send data across the US at even just 650Mbps?

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Oh yeah! Think: a harddrive writes at what an average of 75MB/s [1], and 1Gbit internet is 125MB/s [2]. (Note, Google currently advertises 'up to 1Gbit up and down').

This means that dropbox no longer "syncs". It's just another harddrive in terms of how it works. Copies to and from just as quickly as your harddrive.

Heck, it seems like if you installed an application to your dropbox, and ran your computer off of an SSD, it seems like you could enjoy BETTER performance than if you had that program installed on a 7200rpm drive and ran it locally...

Can't wait to see what we end doing with 1GBit ubiquity!

[1] http://www.tomshardware.com/charts/3.5-hard-drive-charts-200...

[2] http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=1Gbit+in+MB%2Fs

First, even if you "installed an application to your dropbox", it would still be running from your local machine - that's just how Dropbox works.

Second, even if it were running the application from Dropbox's server(s) (it seems like that's what you mean?), it would still have to read from their servers - you can't magically eliminate a bottleneck just by moving it to a different physical computer; data still has to be read from disk.

Though it could be read from several disks simultaneously / cached to flash/RAM and other neat tricks to improve I/O bandwidth.

Though a big datacenter seems like the perfect place to spread the bits around so that you can read from multiple physical disks/computers simultaneously to improve performance. This is unlike your laptop where you are probably not carrying multi-disk arrays around with you.

Hm, could you write a client using the Dropbox API wrapped in, say, a FUSE filesystem driver? Just to use the remote storage directly as a filesystem?

Yes, I messed that up, sorry. But it's still an impressive feat and I'm still very excited about getting 1Gbit internet!

I'd be interested to compare the "seek time" though. Platter drive seek times can be pretty nasty, but I'd be interested to see if Dropbox or some competitor could serve up better with network latency involved.

I'd use DropBox much MORE if I had more than 15 Mbit upstream. If I had 1 Gbit+ speeds, I'd use DropBox for EVERYTHING (5+ TB) and happily pay for it. As it stands now the upload would take far too long to be much use.

Housefires happen regardless of internet connection speed, so yes.

yes. They would have to dramatically decrease their bandwidth charges, and they'd have to lower their charges in general (just 'cause the barrier to entry for their competition would be lower) but if anything, having a fat pipe at home would make storing things remotely a lot more attractive.

Think about it; with that kind of a pipe, you could boot your desktop off of a drive in my datacenter, two cities away.

Think about services like OnLive (who even offers Windows in the cloud). We have these today, but if we had fiber everywhere, we likely wouldn't have the dvd drive in the Xbox 360. We certainly wouldn't need BluRay.

You could, but the latency would still suck.

That's why I said "my data centre, two cities away" and not 'my data centre on the other side of the world'

Yes they would. Its the same reason ftp servers, backup servers and NAS would exist no matter how fast the connection speed is. Its about availability, backups and more holistic access control. It would be interesting to see how these services innovate with such high speed connection though.

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