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I think "replace the hard drive" is a terrible way to say it, since a hard drive (or SSD or SD or whatever) is exactly what you need to be able to use Dropbox.

by cldr 13y ago

hobs 13y ago
Yeah it's definitely "replace the thumb drive"
- _delirium 13y ago
  For most people I know, it replaced email attachments more than anything else. Previous standard was sending stuff back and forth as attachments with names like Proposal_v2_john_edits_2.0_updated.doc
  - hobs 13y ago
    Totally right as well.
pedalpete 13y ago
In the long-term, I think you may look back at the 'replace the hard drive' statement as on par with Bill Gates 'a computer in every home'. If all of your apps save directly to Dropbox your 'hard-drive' and thumb-drive are no longer important, and in that way they are 'replacing' the hard-drive, even if not in technical terms, the sentiment is correct.
- wslh 13y ago
  In the long-term, I think you may look back at the 'replace the hard drive' statement as on par with Bill Gates 'a computer in every home'. That's not possible, since your local storage will always be faster than a networked one.
  - Dylan16807 13y ago
    Always? Hard drives don't transfer at multi-gigabit speeds. Networks do.
    - cldr 13y ago
      For most users, their network speed is way way less than multi-gigabit. May or may not change soon.
      - Dylan16807 13y ago
        I guess I should have just said 'gigabit', which is standard Ethernet speed and is roughly on par with hard drives. The point is that the network is plenty fast. Backbone and edge both. The only problem is a few isps.
    - cityguy 13y ago
      Err, no. The SATA 3.0 spec is 6.0 Gb/s. Most NIC's might run 1Gb/s locally, but once you hit the WAN you're probably talking about 10 or 100Mbit. Network storage has always been slower than local, and until we get 10Gb to the home, will continue to be so.
      - Dylan16807 13y ago
        Hard drives can't saturate SATA. And many millions of people already have gigabit service. That's roughly as fast as most hard drives.
  - wpietri 13y ago
    It's totally possible. It doesn't have to be faster, just fast enough. For everybody's most important app, the browser, local storage is already basically irrelevant. That's trained people to be perfectly fine with little network delays. Things like Google Apps show that data and apps can easily live elsewhere and it's basically fine. In the long term, I think the only question is whether data+apps will live together with the app provider, like Google Docs, or whether data storage will stay generally separate, as DropBox would surely prefer. There will still be some of us who keep big local drives because we really want to know where our files are and control their movements. But for everybody else, local storage will just be cache. Which means whether it's spinning rust vs flash vs RAM is an optimization detail. And that decision will mainly be made by hardware product designers, not users. An interesting thing to think about in this context is how the long-term costs of storage are falling. In the last 20 years, RAM is ~4 orders of magnitude cheaper: http://www.jcmit.com/mem2013.htm http://www.jcmit.com/mem2013.htm Flash is an order of magnitude still cheaper for now. But if networks keep getting better and services like Dropbox get more solid, that may not matter. If you assume trends continue, then putting half a terabyte of RAM in a device may be cheap enough that the added complexity of flash just isn't worth it.
- minimaxir 13y ago
  That assume you're "always-on" the Internet. Microsoft tried that assumption with the Xbox One, and we know how that went. :P
- cldr 13y ago
  One of the points of the article was that storing data completely on the net, instead of synchronising local and remote versions, is not in their vision of the future because "users shouldn't have to worry whether they're online or not", so what you proposed is specifically what they're avoiding.
bigiain 13y ago
Turns out, Dropbox is _most_ useful to me on my devices with insufficient local storage - having access to all my (Dropboxed) files on my phone and iPad is _spectacularly_ useful. I have no doubt there's some very smart people at Dropbox (and Google and Microsoft amd JottaCloud and BTLabs and any number of established companies and startups I've never heard of) are working out how to cater to a new category of "cloud storage user" - people who _don't_ store cannonical versions of all their files/data on their own laptop/desktop, people with a smartphone and a tablet - but with no "main machine" as such. People who want to access all their files from any random shared, borrowed, or rented machine whenever they need a full sized screen and keyboard, but don't need that often enough to own such a machine.

I think "replace the hard drive" is a terrible way to say it, since a hard drive (or SSD or SD or whatever) is exactly what you need to be able to use Dropbox.

by cldr 13y ago

I think "replace the hard drive" is a terrible way to say it, since a hard drive (or SSD or SD or whatever) is exactly what you need to be able to use Dropbox.

hobs 13y ago

Yeah it's definitely "replace the thumb drive"

_delirium 13y ago
For most people I know, it replaced email attachments more than anything else. Previous standard was sending stuff back and forth as attachments with names like Proposal_v2_john_edits_2.0_updated.doc
- hobs 13y ago
  Totally right as well.

pedalpete 13y ago

In the long-term, I think you may look back at the 'replace the hard drive' statement as on par with Bill Gates 'a computer in every home'. If all of your apps save directly to Dropbox your 'hard-drive' and thumb-drive are no longer important, and in that way they are 'replacing' the hard-drive, even if not in technical terms, the sentiment is correct.

wslh 13y ago
In the long-term, I think you may look back at the 'replace the hard drive' statement as on par with Bill Gates 'a computer in every home'. That's not possible, since your local storage will always be faster than a networked one.
- Dylan16807 13y ago
  Always? Hard drives don't transfer at multi-gigabit speeds. Networks do.
  - cldr 13y ago
    For most users, their network speed is way way less than multi-gigabit. May or may not change soon.
    - Dylan16807 13y ago
      I guess I should have just said 'gigabit', which is standard Ethernet speed and is roughly on par with hard drives. The point is that the network is plenty fast. Backbone and edge both. The only problem is a few isps.
  - cityguy 13y ago
    Err, no. The SATA 3.0 spec is 6.0 Gb/s. Most NIC's might run 1Gb/s locally, but once you hit the WAN you're probably talking about 10 or 100Mbit. Network storage has always been slower than local, and until we get 10Gb to the home, will continue to be so.
    - Dylan16807 13y ago
      Hard drives can't saturate SATA. And many millions of people already have gigabit service. That's roughly as fast as most hard drives.
- wpietri 13y ago
  It's totally possible. It doesn't have to be faster, just fast enough. For everybody's most important app, the browser, local storage is already basically irrelevant. That's trained people to be perfectly fine with little network delays. Things like Google Apps show that data and apps can easily live elsewhere and it's basically fine. In the long term, I think the only question is whether data+apps will live together with the app provider, like Google Docs, or whether data storage will stay generally separate, as DropBox would surely prefer. There will still be some of us who keep big local drives because we really want to know where our files are and control their movements. But for everybody else, local storage will just be cache. Which means whether it's spinning rust vs flash vs RAM is an optimization detail. And that decision will mainly be made by hardware product designers, not users. An interesting thing to think about in this context is how the long-term costs of storage are falling. In the last 20 years, RAM is ~4 orders of magnitude cheaper: http://www.jcmit.com/mem2013.htm http://www.jcmit.com/mem2013.htm Flash is an order of magnitude still cheaper for now. But if networks keep getting better and services like Dropbox get more solid, that may not matter. If you assume trends continue, then putting half a terabyte of RAM in a device may be cheap enough that the added complexity of flash just isn't worth it.
minimaxir 13y ago
That assume you're "always-on" the Internet. Microsoft tried that assumption with the Xbox One, and we know how that went. :P
cldr 13y ago
One of the points of the article was that storing data completely on the net, instead of synchronising local and remote versions, is not in their vision of the future because "users shouldn't have to worry whether they're online or not", so what you proposed is specifically what they're avoiding.

bigiain 13y ago

Turns out, Dropbox is _most_ useful to me on my devices with insufficient local storage - having access to all my (Dropboxed) files on my phone and iPad is _spectacularly_ useful. I have no doubt there's some very smart people at Dropbox (and Google and Microsoft amd JottaCloud and BTLabs and any number of established companies and startups I've never heard of) are working out how to cater to a new category of "cloud storage user" - people who _don't_ store cannonical versions of all their files/data on their own laptop/desktop, people with a smartphone and a tablet - but with no "main machine" as such. People who want to access all their files from any random shared, borrowed, or rented machine whenever they need a full sized screen and keyboard, but don't need that often enough to own such a machine.