Comment by betterth | Hacker News Reader

Comment by betterth | Hacker News Reader

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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.

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

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?

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

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.

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