Hacker News Reader

I think this is going to come into play quite heavily with Amazon Cloud Drive vs. Dropbox, given that Dropbox uses S3. Disk space will always be cheaper for Amazon.

View on HN

Cloud storage companies reduce their costs and storage needs by analyzing stored content to find duplicate content (and I would think partially duplicate content) so that they can store only single copies.

I think BitCasa offers unlimited storage. They had stated some time ago that they can offer unlimited storage because their algorithms for content matching were very effective at limiting what they actually had to store. Size becomes a competitive advantage.

I agree, but anything Dropbox can do, Amazon can do too, including dedupe. And if Amazon owns the disks, they get to benefit from Dropbox's usage in terms of economies of scale, but without having to pay an outside vendor for the privilege.

Except Amazon can't dedupe what dropbox has already deduped. It's hard to tell if they're really an ideal customer.

To be clear, I meant that Amazon can dedupe what is uploaded through their Dropbox competitor, vs. the ability to dedupe Dropbox's data as it hits S3.

Amazon is in this funny position where they can't help but compete with their clients because almost every internet company is their client.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com