Over the past few months, clouds have been gathering all over the digital landscape. These aren’t the kinds of clouds that mean ominous weather or Willie Nelson’s tour bus are approaching, rather these are cloud storage services that allow users to access files from any number of locations, and on any number of devices.

The folks over at LaptopMag.com recently studied which cloud storage service runs the fastest. Their blog post describes the test, “To conduct our tests, we zipped a 300MB folder filled with photos, music and video files then uploaded it to and downloaded it from Google Drive, SkyDrive,  SugarSync, Dropbox and Kim Dotcom’s new Mega service. We performed each set of uploads and downloads three times and took the average, conducting our testing over the course of five business days.”

Results were mixed, with new kid on the block Mega taking top speed for uploading (2:34, compared to 3:08 for SkyDrive, 3:39 for Google Drive, 4:49 for Dropbox, and a staggering 10:27 for Sugarsync), and Google Drive taking top speed for downloading (3:28, compared to 3:33 for Dropbox, 3:56 for Mega, 4:36 for SkyDrive and an equally staggering 11:02 for Sugarsync).

But speed isn’t the only consideration to make with cloud storage services – safety, privacy, price and storage capacity are all especially important too.

Do you use any of the cloud storage services in this post? If so, which one and why? Share in the comments.

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