2013 September 03 Archive - EXEIdeas

Cloud services have become extremely popular in the recent years, and now you can find quite a few of them. Sky Drive, Google Drive and Dropbox are some of the most popular cloud services available today and different people as well as companies like them for different reasons. There are several tests that you can also conduct on your own to compare all these services and then select the best one considering the test-results.The Overall Speed:It is important to consider how much time it takes a cloud service to download or upload a file. The results shown here for each service are for an 8.1MP file — it was an MP3file. Here are the findings. Google Drive was the clear winner when downloading the file from the web. The download took 8 seconds to complete, which was less than the time taken by Dropbox (12 seconds) and Sky Drive (24seconds).Google Drive was a better option when uploading a file to the cloud using a website. Google Drive took 24 seconds to upload the file, whereas Dropbox took 30 seconds to complete the upload — Sky Drive was at the last place with 33 seconds.Dropbox won hands down when uploading a file through a desktop app — it took only 17 seconds to complete the upload. The second place was claimed by the Google Drive, which took 32 seconds. The Sky Drive came last with a total of 42 seconds taken to upload the file.Interestingly, Dropbox makes use of Amazon S3 as back-end, but is still faster than the Amazon cloud in all three aspects mentioned above. You should consider this seriously, especially if you are currently relying on the Amazon cloud drive.Uploading The File Multiple Times:Many people don’t understand the fact that if they upload something multiple times, this may affect the cloud service — it may affect uploading times in a positive or a negative way. This happens for different reasons, and the speed of your internet connection is a common issue. Therefore, it is a good idea to conduct your speed test a number of times to get accurate results. These test results are based on how each cloud service performed when an 8.1MB file was uploaded a number of times. Dropbox was the winner here, as the first upload took 60 seconds for the first upload, but the combined time for all four uploads was less than 90 seconds — every subsequent upload took 10 seconds or less. This implies the fact that they have used some impressive protocols along with an efficient cashing system within the Dropbox cloud. It is probably for this reason that Dropbox performs better than the Amazon cloud.The Google Drive claimed the second place with 120 seconds taken to upload all four files. Even though it took more time as compared to Dropbox, there wasn’t a decline in its speed after subsequent uploads. Each file took almost 30 seconds, and you should give Google Drive full marks for its consistency — you cannot find such consistency with Sky Drive, Box.net, or Amazon cloud.The Sky Drive wasn’t the most impressive in this regard, as it took 160 seconds to upload the files. It means that each of the four files took almost 40 seconds to upload. However, the tests also showed that the first file took the longest to upload — the time was relatively short and even for subsequent uploads.Conclusion:The fact of the matter is that different cloud services perform differently in different tests, but if you compare these three, you will see that the Google Drive and Drop Box cloud services are slightly better than the rest. Of course, you cannot say that other services are not good — they have their highs as well. It is a matter of your unique needs and requirements. If you are overly concerned about the speed of upload, you may not find the Sky Drive to be the best option, as it’s the slowest of the lot (even though the difference is of a few seconds only). You should take your time to conduct these tests and check the results of other tests to make a right choice, but the fact remains that the difference between all three is not huge — it means that no matter which service you pick, you simply couldn’t go too far wrong.#ath{background:#f8f8f8;margin:0 0 40px 0;padding:10px;border:3px outset #e8e8e8;-moz-border-radius:10px;border-radius:10px;overflow:hidden;font-size:14px;}.pro{background:#FFF;float:left;margin:0 10px 0 0;padding:4px;border:2px inset #e8e8e8;}.social{float:right;}About the Author:This post is written by Kate Funk. She is a professional blogger and writer at Tutorsclass. She specializes in topics of interest to techno geeks and networking enthusiasts.Find Me On GooglePlus