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Which Cloud Drive Performs the Best?

CW Staff

November 27, 2013

British researchers recently tested the top 5 cloud storage options available to consumers. In terms of popularity, the top 5 cloud storage options are DropBox, SkyDrive, Google Drive, Amazon’s Cloud Drive and Lacie’s Wuala. The research report admittedly could have some flaws because these services were tested from one location within the continent of Europe. The researchers did not test these services from other continents.
What did the researchers find? DropBox, which is the most popular public cloud storage option, actually operates the best when compared side by side to the other providers. This conclusion is based on the fact that DropBox offers a method that minimizes the bandwidth between the consumer and the cloud. The conclusion of the report did not sort the services on a 1 to 5 scale. The report created a matrix which produced a check-box or an ‘X’ for each service indicating which features are available for chunking, bundling, deduplication, delta encoding and compression. Here is an illustration of the data found on that matrix:

Surprisingly, the Amazon Cloud Drive performed the worst in the researcher’s tests. The tests concluded that Amazon’s cloud drive used the most bandwidth compared to the other services. Cloud Drive offers no file compression whereas DropBox always offer file compression thus making the transfer that much quicker. Of the other services, SkyDrive and Wuala did not offer file compression while Google Drive only offers smart compression. What’s more impressive about DropBox is that it routes all of its data through the United States.  Experts are starting wonder if DropBox can become a replacement for NAS. Administrators will have to make this decision for their clients based on their unique situation.