Tuesday, December 9, 2014

Which Cloud Storage Provider is the Fastest?

Most applications and services people use day to day on the Internet were designed with users only having access to normal broadband speeds in mind. When a user suddenly has Gigabit Internet, it can make the rest of the Internet feel slow in comparison. I thought it might be helpful to compare providers for different Internet applications and services and show which ones are the fastest (and therefor the "best" to use with Google Fiber.) I'll be comparing them only by speed and nothing else.

First up is Cloud Storage Providers.

I came up with the four most popular providers I could think of and tested both their Windows application and website for upload and download speed with the same 572MB test file. All tests are wired in, downloading/uploading the test file from an SSD, each direction was only tested once.
Note: iCloud Drive doesn't have a Windows app, so I tested their website only.
Second Note: Graphs are measuring speed in Megabytes per second (MB/s)

Test Machine:
Windows 7 Professional 64-bit SP1
Google Chrome was used for Website tests
Google Fiber's speed was verified using their KC speedtest server before running these tests (at least 940Mb/s up and down)


 Dropbox is the clear winner among the Windows Apps with the highest average speeds.













The result for fastest website was less clear. Apple iCloud had the fastest upload, while Google Drive had the fastest download. Overall Apple iCloud had the fastest combined average upload/download speed.

If you have ideas for other stuff to test or think I screwed this test up, feel free to leave a comment.

2 comments:

Mouse said...

To clarify, were these tests run from a computer with a Google Fiber connection?

CompTech said...

Yes, these tests were run on a computer with Google Fiber.