Case Study: Davidson College achieves fast file sync and major cost savings with Dropbox for Education

Why one college chose Dropbox over Box, Google Drive, and OneDrive

Davidson College, a private liberal arts school in North Carolina, needed to replace a 20‑year‑old Windows file server to enable better collaboration and predictable costs. The IT team ran head‑to‑head tests of Dropbox, Box, Google Drive, and OneDrive — including a 112 GB, 70,000‑file “sync or swim” trial — and found Dropbox completed the upload in hours while the others failed after five days, proving it met Davidson’s performance and reliability needs.

Davidson chose Dropbox for Education and began deployment in March 2015, achieving a 70% invitation acceptance rate within weeks and leveraging many existing user accounts. The move has sped collaboration, supported mobile and off‑campus work, and changed storage economics — allowing Davidson to avoid a costly new SAN and anticipate roughly half the previous storage spend by combining Dropbox with VMware‑optimized SSDs; full access for all 2,500 community members was planned for fall 2016.

Davidson College

Rob Smith

Director of Systems & Networks