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Dropbox announces new gen server hardware for higher efficiency and scalability
- poink 1y agoIt would be sick if they could leverage this increased efficiency to reduce how frequently they bother already paying customers with annoying upsells
- FirmwareBurner 1y agoThese kinds of upsell decisions aren't coming from the same people who work on technical topics.
- epolanski 1y agoI think their former head of growth (Elena Verna), stated on LinkedIn that everybody in the company hates those black patterns too, yet every single experiment in removing them and providing alternatives resulted in unacceptable revenue losses.
- cedws 1y agoYeah that’s generally how it works, you throw away ethics to make more money.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- raverbashing 1y agoWell honestly it's hard to sell a feature as a product.
- zaphirplane 1y agoIn case you are wondering this was a Steve jobs quote
- merelysounds 1y agoI hope this analysis does not factor in the brand damage, lower user satisfaction and the risk of losing customers to an emerging competitor without these dark patterns.
- lucyjojo 1y agohonestly it might very well be optimal (if you optimize for money). optimal does not have to be pleasant.
- wiether 1y agoYesterday they sent me an email inviting me to use "Dropbox Passwords". A service that they decided to abandon: https://help.dropbox.com/installs/dropbox-passwords-discontinuation https://help.dropbox.com/installs/dropbox-passwords-disconti...
- afandian 1y ago> a new band of storage areal density has finally arrived Surely 'density' is a measure of stuff per area? Does 'areal density' have an additional meaning?
- automatic6131 1y agoAreal is the adjective form of area.
- AndrewDucker 1y agoYou get linear density (for density along a line) and also volumetric density (scales with volume). So you're basically making it clear how many dimensions are important to your measurement. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Area_density https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Area_density
- echoangle 1y ago> Surely 'density' is a measure of stuff per area? Not really, the normal definition of density is mass per volume. If you mean something else (like storage capacity per area), it needs to be specified.
- awill 1y agoDropbox Storage is a MUCH easier problem to solve than S3. They don't have the mix of high perf vs cold backup storage, so design is much, much simpler.
- ddorian43 1y agoIts the same design. Actually, S3 is easier, because of the bigger scale, making it easier to support high perf. The bigger the scale the easier it is to support high perf on HDDs.
- Philpax 1y agoOut of curiosity, do people here still use Dropbox? I've had an account for over a decade, but haven't used it since ~2014; Google Drive and Syncthing have largely replaced it for me.
- AznHisoka 1y agoI still do and I mainly use it for backups of important photos and docs. I also trust it more over Google Drive because the latter has given me poor first impressions when sharing links and file size limits
- bayindirh 1y agoI bet some people do. Nobody has "apps" and that many integrations like Dropbox. Plus, it runs on all major platforms, and integrate many services. So you don't have to pay for a bunch of services if you pay for Dropbox.
- thahaonline 1y agoI do. Backup all my stuff using Duplicati to OneDrive, as it integrates quite well. Works best with that software IMHO. Quite cheap for 2TB, also use it for my parents PC back-up.
- bionsystem 1y agoThey are losing tons of customers each quarter.
- bayindirh 1y agoSource?
- bionsystem 1y agoTheir quarterly reports.
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- dd_xplore 1y agoI always thought dual socket systems would be good for storage and vps based systems, but here we see that inter socket latency was hampering them. Good read!
- matt-p 1y agoThis has been known for quite a while, in distributed systems single socket for storage is both far cheaper and typically faster. I remember building these with E3-v5 a good while back.
- joduplessis 1y agoRecently moved all my stuff from iCloud to DB - worth every penny.
- Spiritus 1y agoCurious why? I'm considering doing the opposite since I have to pay for iCloud anyway.
- joduplessis 1y agoYou can actually keep it offline (permanently) and their sync is more immediate. iCloud gave me issues when downloading many (large files) and you couldn't really prioritise certain files. That, and a few other smaller things - like a much better web app experience, etc. I actually still pay for iCloud - but mainly for the Photos storage space.
- wenc 1y agoI pay for both. iCloud for photos and Mac backup. Dropbox for files. iCloud is somehow not good for low latency file syncs. Even for photos it’s not excellent. It takes a while for photos on my phone to show up on my macOS Photos app. But I’m less sensitive to photos lagging than actual files lagging. Dropbox is instantaneous.
- theanonymousone 1y agoHow is Dropbox doing by the way? Are they in good shape? They seem to be "out of headlines" for some time, which of course is not necessarily a bad thing...
- josephwegner 1y agoPretty sure they lost to rsync ;)
- onli 1y agoAren't they out of the headlines because they cut ties with the tech community? Hired Condoleezza rice, spammed notifications, made sharing without account impossible (or hard?), broke shared links on purpose, bought and shut down mailbox. And all of that plus very high prices. They do claim to be profitable though, if I read that correctly.
- plasticsoprano 1y agoYou can share without an account no problem. Condi hasn’t been on their board in years. Haven’t heard about this broken shared links. Their earnings were released last week. Their pre-GAAP margin is like 40%.
- OJFord 1y agoI'm surprised Dropbox is not just 'own data centre' but 'teams designing custom hardware for our own data centre' scale tbh? Although I also would not have guessed that (even after laying off ~500 in each of 2023 and '24) it had a headcount of about 2100.
- matt-p 1y agoIt's not really designing to be honest here, what they describe is more "specifying". These will just be fairly off the shelf designs with thier own choice of ram/disk/CPU and so on.
- blitzar 1y agoI have a few qualms with this server hardware 1. You can already build such a system yourself quite trivially 2. It doesn't actually replace a USB drive 3. It does not seem very "viral" or income-generating
- matt-p 1y agoDoubling the PDUs seems shockingly wasteful as apposed to just reducing equipment per rack slightly, there's no way you can consistently cool 30KW/rack with air (well, OK, you could but it's much more inefficient or would require RDHX). Best case you're looking at about 20KW, so they've doubled the power infra to deliver up to 30% more power? Lower rack densities are also more efficient overall (down to about 6KW/Rack where they start getting more in-efficient again) as you're able to move air more slowly over the severs, it's much better for example to have two racks of 20X2U 500W servers than one rack of 40X1U 500W servers, as you can use bigger fans in the servers which are more efficient, and handle air in the room more easily.
- ngrilly 1y agoI'm wondering how Oxide Computer racks can look so clean (for example in this picture: https://bsky.app/profile/oxide.computer/post/3lvdw7mdwms2i https://bsky.app/profile/oxide.computer/post/3lvdw7mdwms2i) compared to Dropbox's racks, and if there is a technical advantage beyond the aesthetic advantage.
- matt-p 1y agoThe pictures of Dropbox is from the rear of the rack, oxide is the front. Oxide may well have a neater 'rear' though as they sell it as a whole system so will have bus bars and similar rather than PDUs and cables I imagine.
- ngrilly 1y agoYou're right. Here is a picture of the back: https://substack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com/public/images/e09302cf-5e06-4576-94dd-ee1d59b23fe9_1384x964.png https://substack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com/public/images/e...
- matt-p 1y agoInteresting, still cabled power, slightly neater but not really.
- ngrilly 1y agoFound some explanation on their blog: > Anyone accustomed to a datacenter will note the missing mass of cold-aisle cabling that one typically sees at the front of a rack. But moving to the back of the rack reveals only a DC busbar and a tight, cabled backplane. This represents one of the bigger bets we made: we blindmated networking. This was mechanically tricky, but the payoff is huge: capacity can be added to the Oxide cloud computer simply by snapping in a new compute sled — nothing to be cabled whatsoever! This is a domain in which we have leapfrogged the hyperscalers, who (for their own legacy reasons) don’t do it this way. This can be jarring to veteran technologists. As one exclaimed upon seeing the rack last week, "I am both surprised and delighted!" (Or rather: a very profane variant of that sentiment.) https://oxide.computer/blog/the-cloud-computer#_where_are_the_cables https://oxide.computer/blog/the-cloud-computer#_where_are_th...