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By popular demand I am posting a thorough speed test comparison between the most common personal cloud services. In this post I’ll show you some speed tests of Dropbox vs Google Drive vs Box vs SkyDrive vs Amazon Cloud Drive.

The previous post Dropbox vs Google Drive is still the article that attracts more visits to this blog so I thought of completing that analysis with some tests on the remaining services that I didn’t consider in that old article.

As in the other post I am writing this notice:

I acknowledge that this testing methodology is far from being scientific.

My setup and test methods might have affected the results and other people might get different values even opposite from what I am sharing in this post.

The results posted on this blog are for personal use only and do not constitute a definitive proof on what service is faster.

More tests, using different scenarios, different networks, and a systematic way to time events are needed to calculate average times, variance values and to draw some more informative conclusions.

In summary, the results you see in this post are of academic value or put in in another way, take the results for what they are.

I’ve tried to run the tests on different days, when the home network was not being used by any other computer and by making sure that no other application was uploading data.

To complete my notice, bear in mind that this post is not meant to show what service is better. In order to choose the service that works best for you, you should take into account different factors:

• The integration of that service with other software you are using
• If the service fits with your workflow
• Costs
• What ecosystem you prefer to work in.

Methodology and configuration

I have simply installed the desktop applications for Dropbox, Google Drive, SkyDrive, Box and Amazon Cloud Drive on my MacBook Air and started uploading/downloading these files:

1. mp3 file, 8.1MB
2. zip file, 5.5MB
3. One folder containing multiple levels of subfolders, 2.1MB

My test methodology simply involved carrying out a Copy Item and Paste Item operation of the test file stored on the Desktop to the destination application folder, while measuring the time using a stopwatch.

The errors that you invariably introduce when you execute tests in this way can be so big that I wisely decided not to consider fractions of a second in my measurements. All data is rounded to the nearest second.

To avoid that other software might influence the upload speeds, before running my tests I quit other browsers, email program, RSS reader, stopped Time Machine etc.

The configuration I ran my tests with is:
- MacBook Air 13″ mid–2012, i7, 8GB RAM, 512GB HDD
- OS X 10.8.3
- 30Mbit/sec down, 5Mbit/sec up broadband

Test results with single files

When uploading either an mp3 file or a zip file, you get similar results. Dropbox, suffers most during the first upload but then it becomes the fastest application if you upload that file multiple times.

The reason for this behaviour is because of the technology used by Dropbox. Dropbox splits the file in small chunks, it then calculates the hash for that chunk and upload it only if the corresponding hash doesn’t exist yet on Dropbox servers. This process is the basis for Dropbox’s fantastic upload speeds.

The interesting fact is that this technology is applied only when using the desktop app. If you upload a file to Dropbox using the web interface, you cannot avail of this feature.

The following graph shows the results uploading and downloading an mp3 file:

What it is not clear to me is why Dropbox, that uses Amazon S3 as back-end, consistently gets better results than Amazon’s solution.

The only answer I could find is that Dropbox uses some sort of cache-service between users and Amazon servers that helps speed up uploads. Still, I have problems explaining this behaviour given the scale of Amazon data centres.

This graph gives you an idea of the effect of Dropbox technology when you upload a file multiple times:

The results I measured when uploading/downloading a zip file are summarized in this graph:

SkyDrive has shown disappointing results in all tests involving uploading files from the desktop app. I hope that the recent improvements to the desktop app for Windows are going to be ported to Mac as well.

Test results with a folder/subfolder structure

The reason I decided to run a test uploading a folder with multiple levels of subfolders is because during the previous tests I noticed a peculiar behaviour with Google Drive.

In that case Google’s solution had serious problems uploading complex structures of folders that included multiple levels of sub-folders. I still don’t know what the problem was but given the fairly high number of trackbacks from Google forums, it was obvious that I was not the only user experiencing that behaviour.

Good news is, Google seems to have solved that problem. In my tests I did not experience any issues when uploading a complex folder/sub-folder structure. The upload is now smooth.

These are the results:

With the exception of Dropbox, SkyDrive consistently showed better results than the other services when it came to upload complex folder-subfolder structures. This is an interesting change with the results seen with single files.

Additional notes

While running my tests I jotted down some thoughts that I’d like to share with you:

• Dropbox was fast when uploading a file multiple times because of the technology being used. The average speeds reached were quite high but I wonder how many times you happen to upload a file multiple times. To put it in another way, I wonder if that test case made any sense at all. I think the big advantage of this technology is the fact that changes are uploaded almost instantly because only the file chunk that is changed gets uploaded to Dropbox.
• During my tests, Google Drive app for Mac showed problems with file syncing. A few times, I noticed that deleting a file from the web interface did not trigger a corresponding delete command on the Finder.
• Both Google Drive and SkyDrive apps started syncing files added to their respective folders with a considerable delay. In my tests it usually took between 9 and 12 seconds for Google Drive and SkyDrive to realize that I had copied a file in the sync folder and actually start the sync process. Most likely the delay is due to the longer polling time with which the sync engine checks if there are new files in the sync folder. Raising the polling time likely helps to keep the consumption of system resources to a minimum without affecting the sync results.
• SkyDrive web interface proved to be quite unreliable. After completing a few upload tests, my files did not display in the UI until being refreshed.
• Amazon cloud drive web UI still uses Flash. This is annoying.
• I liked the integration of Google Cloud Drive with OS X Notifications
• Box.net web interface was a pain to use. It is not user friendly at all and it reminds me a lot of your typical enterprise type software without any time spent on the usability of the UI.
• On Box defence, I liked the reliable synchronization.

Conclusions

If speed is an important factor for you, before you settle with any of these services, I suggest you repeat some of the tests I ran, to assess whether you get similar results. If you do so, I’d be happy to hear from you.

Also, consider what you’ll be doing with that cloud sync service. Do you live in a Google world? Well, in that case you can’t go wrong with Google Drive. Compared to my previous post it has shown a vast improvement and I would seriously consider it if I kept my docs in the Google cloud.

You can reach an opposite conclusion if you use Microsoft Office a lot. In this case SkyDrive has its advantages.

But the service that impressed me most is Amazon Cloud Drive. Beside some annoyances like the use of Flash in the web UI, the service shows that Amazon has the capability, resources and knowledge to dominate in the cloud space, even for personal use.

The desktop software feels solid and even though the results I measured are not the best among the other contenders, I liked the general feeling of reliability that the solution showed.

The recent addition of Cloud Drive app for iPhone, a specific app used to upload pictures to Amazon cloud is a reminder that Amazon is serious about the cloud for the rest of us.