For nearly a decade, Dropbox has run its own hardware infrastructure. We have one of the few exabyte-scale storage systems in the world, and running infrastructure at this scale takes a lot of time and planning to build and maintain. Our Hardware team architects, ships, and maintains all of the physical hardware in the data centers that keep Dropbox online, and we recently hit an exciting milestone: we shipped our sixth generation hardware designs. | dropbox.tech
In 2018, Dropbox became the first major tech company to adopt high-density SMR (shingled magnetic recording) technology for our storage drives. By 2019, our SMR fleet size was around 25%. Today, a staggering 90% of our total HDD fleet size is now SMR capable, and we’ve continued to lead the industry in adoption with the deployment of two additional SMR hard drive models. | dropbox.tech
To understand how we got to where we are today, it’s helpful to understand how we built the infrastructure foundation on which Dropbox runs. Back in 2015, we relocated all US customer data from off-premises hosts to on-site ones. The Magic Pocket team executed a massive migration project, bringing the bulk of Dropbox’s file storage into our own custom-built infrastructure. Over 90% of the roughly 600PB of data we stored at the time was moved into data centers we managed ourselves—a turn...| dropbox.tech