[jasonzemos]

> I wonder if Amazon hasn't cut Dropbox a huge discount to keep them around.

I can't imagine why they would. Dropbox dedupes all their data before hitting S3, but Amazon can still leverage their bulk hardware discounts that Dropbox likely isn't big enough to score. Amazon would have the upper hand in such a deal, and I don't see why it would be friendly.

> http://blog.backblaze.com/2013/02/20/180tb-of-good-vibration.... looks like an interesting solution to storage.

AFAIK those boxes are and have usually been tuned for lukewarm or maybe even lukecold storage to cut costs. Dozens of 5400 rpm drives loaded on bare minimal support planes have a genuine rating of Shit for reliable seek times. It's great for backup, when you only expect a small fraction of users to actually make a query and be thankful enough they're pulling down a recovery. For the kind of direction Dropbox wants to take, this is absolutely out of the question.

[byoung2]

Dropbox hosts the metadata on much faster hardware. When you find your file, seek time on the file system is not as important as transfer speed, and over the Internet, the network is your bottleneck, not your spinning media.