How Fast is Your Cloud Storage?

There are many factors affecting cloud storage speed, such as the Internet pipe between you and the data center that is hosting the storage; how scalable the service provider is; how many user are using it at the same time and etc?

We can do an upload/download test to see how fast you can upload data to the cloud storage and how fast you can retrieve the data back. In this experiment, we will test Amazon S3, Windows Azure Storage, Google Storage for Developers, AT&T Synaptic Storage and Peer1 CloudOne storage.

Since the speed varies depending where you are and who your Internet service provider is, the data here is only good to the person testing it. You will need to do the same test on your own if you are interested in how fast you can connect to the cloud storage services.

First thing is to make sure the Internet connection is fast enough for the testing. You can use www.speedtest.net. Here is a look at our current setup. This is the speed between my location and the ISP. Download speed anywhere from 6Mb/s and above is good. upload anywhere from 1Mb/s and above is good too.

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Next is to mount all these cloud storage services into Gladinet Cloud Desktop.

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I have a 15MByte file (15,517,696 Bytes - GladinetSetup_2.3.392_x64.msi ). The file will be copied to each cloud storage service. Later clear the Gladinet cache and the files will be downloaded again. Each time, the duration is captured using a Stopwatch. All the upload and download will be initiated from Command Prompt since Windows Explore may do some background pre-download tasks.

  Upload (sec) Download 1(Sec) Download 2(sec) Download 3(sec) Average Download(sec)
Amazon S3 83 18 20 17 18
AT&T Synaptic Storage 84 37 49 45 43
Google Storage for Developer 94 15 17 17 16
Peer1 CloudOne 85 20 16 19 18
Windows Azure Blob Storage 86 48 72 52 57

What I found is for my location and setup, the upload to different cloud storage services is pretty consistent.

However, the download speed varies. Even for the same service provider, some times there is a big swing to the speed.

My upload speed to the cloud storage services is around 1.5Mb/s, smaller than the pipe my ISP has (3.35Mb/s). My download speed from those cloud storage services vary from 2.2 Mb/s to 7.7 Mb/s (smaller than my ISP connection speed too)

These numbers can be used to determine cloud storage use cases. For example, you can use these number to calculate how fast you can do a cloud backup and how soon a restore can be done.

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