Dropbox
Dropbox employs advanced SMR technology for its storage drives, significantly reducing power requirements and costs while enhancing server efficiency and capacity.
Dropbox SMR Technology
Dropbox utilizes high-density SMR (shingled magnetic recording) technology in its storage drives. SMR enhances storage capacity by overlapping data tracks like shingles on a roof, effectively increasing the number of tracks per inch (TPI). The technology has enabled Dropbox to reduce power requirements, lower the cost per exabyte, and optimize server rack designs. An advanced form of SMR, known as two-dimensional magnetic recording (TDMR), incorporates an additional reader per head to improve read accuracy. Dropbox’s latest SMR drives feature nine platters and eighteen heads, significantly outpacing earlier models.
Dropbox Storage Server Evolution
Dropbox has progressively enhanced its storage server designs, leading to substantial improvements in efficiency and capacity. The sixth generation storage server requires five megawatts less power and occupies only one-third of the physical rack space needed to serve an exabyte of data compared to previous generations. With an enclosure count increase of 2.8 times since the first design and 1.8 times since the deployment of SMR drives, Dropbox continues to innovate in storage solutions.
Dropbox Power Efficiency and Cost Reduction
Dropbox's SMR drives demonstrate significant power efficiency with a consumption of approximately 0.30 watts per 1 TB in idle and 0.50 watts per 1 TB for random read workloads. The adoption of SMR technology has not only reduced power requirements but also lowered the overall cost of each exabyte of storage. Future plans involve incorporating heat-assisted magnetic recording (HAMR) technology to further increase storage densities, aiming for disk capacities of 50 TB and beyond.
Dropbox Edison Platform
The Edison platform at Dropbox enables rapid development cycles and isomorphic rendering, supporting JavaScript to run seamlessly on both client and server sides. The Edison Server, written in Go, delegates server-side rendering to a Streaming React server, a Go-wrapped Node service. Edison Localmode facilitates Dropbox engineers in serving all static assets such as JavaScript and CSS directly from their development laptops, significantly speeding up development iteration loops.