Why I'm switching from Dropbox to Google Drive

I have been a paid subscriber of the Dropbox cloud storage service for over two years, syncing files from home to office, across PCs and Macs. A few weeks ago, Google launched their Google Drive service, which is very similar to Dropbox. I tested Google Drive and I'm happy with the service:

• Google Drive is very fast for uploading and downloading files. One big problem I had with Dropbox was the speed of uploading files. Whenever I wanted to share a file through Dropbox, I had to wait a long time for my file to get uploaded to Dropbox. That's not a problem with Google Drive--huge files can be uploaded in minutes.

• Google Drive gives you more storage at lower prices. Dropbox gives you 2GB free storage but Google Drive gives you 5GB for free. For US$19.99, I get 400GB of Google Drive storage while Dropbox only gives me 100GB.
• Google Drive works better for sharing videos. When you upload a video file to Google Drive, it automatically gets transcoded into lower bitrates so that your recipients can watch the video through a streaming Flash player with minimal buffering, just like YouTube. However, the streaming video playback doesn't work on iOS devices yet, and I hope Google fixes this soon.
• Watch out for the occasional high CPU utilization. A few times I had to kill the Google Drive process because it was using too much CPU. I suppose Google Drive is doing lots of data compression to achieve the speedy data transfer.
• Google Drive doesn't have a client app yet for iOS, but their mobile Web site meets my needs.

After two weeks of testing, I'm fully convinced that Google Drive is a good replacement for Dropbox so I'm switching over to Google Drive. Google Drive is the best cloud service that fully exploits the fastest fiber networks in Asia.