Hmm.. I read that a 2 hour Netflix movie is about 2 GB. So you need ~2.2 Mbps per user or 183 iops / client in terms of 1.5K packets. One drive can fit 2000 m

Hmm.. I read that a 2 hour Netflix movie is about 2 GB. So you need ~2.2 Mbps per user or 183 iops / client in terms of 1.5K packets. One drive can fit 2000 movies. 75K iops/drive / 183 iops/client = 400 clients/drive (this is 900 Mbps, but the drive says up to 400 MB/s, so not bandwidth limited). Put 16 in a 2U server for 6400 clients. This is 14 Gbps, so you need two 10 G NICs to complete our Netflix appliance. But you are right, if caching works we don't need all these drives. With 128 GB of RAM we can fit 64 movies in RAM. I could easily believe that most people only watch the popular movies.