[throwaway340953]

Depends where you're downloading from. S3 single stream GET throughput is throttled to ~40MB/sec. An HDD can write at ~200MB/sec and SSDs can write ~500MB/sec. NICs on old EC2 instances can do 10Gbps and the new ones can do 25Gbps.

If you're on a home internet/mobile connection downloading large files, a single download will likely saturate your connection. If you're on an EC2 instance, you should be able to do 10-100x better parallelizing.

Source: I used to work on S3.

[haimez]

FWIW: that 40MB single stream limit doesn’t seem to exist from my empirical measurements in the last two years. When did you work on S3?

[Galanwe]

It does exist, but it's 80MB/s nowadays.

[Galanwe]

> S3 single stream GET throughput is throttled to ~40MB/sec

More like 80MB/s