I think the article's title question is a bit misleading because it focuses on peak throughput for S3 as a whole. The interesting question is "How can the throu

I think the article's title question is a bit misleading because it focuses on peak throughput for S3 as a whole. The interesting question is "How can the throughput for a GET exceed the throughput of an HDD?" If you just replicated, you could still get big throughput for S3 as a whole by doing many reads that target different HDDs. But you'd still be limited to max HDD throughput * number of GETs. S3 is not so limited, and that's interesting and non-obvious!