OneDrive Review

Today, you can find many cloud services on the internet, and if you look at the surface, every single cloud service is unique. But, if you look closer, there aren’t many differences here, aside from pricing and a total amount of space. Microsoft also developed their own cloud space, designed for the users of Windows 10, called OneDrive. Sure, it goes well with Windows, and it’s a great and compelling tool for this operating system. But what happens if we look at OneDrive like a standalone cloud storage? Well, the things become more interesting.

What is OneDrive?

As I mentioned, OneDrive is a property of Microsoft, and it’s designed to be the number one cloud space storage for users of Windows, which are plenty at the moment. Beginning at 5GB of storage space, OneDrive isn’t the most generous cloud service I’ve used, but in the later review, we are going to take a look at some of the most important features regarding this cloud service.

Performance and Features

Under this section, we are going to talk about the overall performance when it comes to the upload and download speeds, their ease of use and the features of OneDrive. Performance first. For my review, I decided to go premium and buy 1TB subscription plan for $9.99 a month. Does this sound familiar? To me it sounds; as the Google ramped up the same price for their Google Drive cloud service, so nothing strange and nothing too expensive. 1TB of data is arguably a big chunk of data, and having in mind that most of HDDs and SSDs boast that size, we need to check the upload and download speed for this amount of data.

When uploading, OneDrive shows very good performance. With my not-so-fast network, I manage to upload 1TB of data in around eight days. It’s actually seven and a half days, but let’s say it eight. Overall, the upload speed is among the fastest out there, similar to Google Drive and IDrive, so OneDrive is a fair competitor. On the other side, the download isn’t impressive here. I know that cloud services get their upload speeds to the maximum, but downloading is also necessary, and here I’m very disappointed. To download 1TB of data, I needed far more than two weeks. Come on, Microsoft, you can do it much better!

Feature-wise, I’m also not that impressed. Aside from great upload speed, OneDrive failed the download speed test. However, as OneDrive comes with a full Microsoft Office 365 suite, that’s my favorite feature out there. You can now use your favorite Office apps while paying just around ten dollars a month. Pretty awesome.

Ease of Use

Ease of use is a very important factor for cloud services. And again, the upload is much easier than the download. You can upload your files simply, with few clicks and the best of all is that you can do it directly from your PC. The files are then organized into folders like music, pictures, videos etc similar to your PC organization, and that’s great. The downside here is regarding the download process. You are required to access your account in order to download your files. I’m not happy about this, as I expected to download files directly from the app like the best cloud services provide.

Pricing

Pricing of Microsoft OneDrive is odd. Yes, there are options for a small family of three computers and a big family of five computers, but they are a little expensive for me. For example, the first option will cost you $9.99 a month or $119.88 a year. In my opinion, the best value is $44.62, which offers an unlimited number of PCs in your home, and you’ll have 1TB of cloud space on each. I can understand why OneDrive is a little expensive though and I think that it’s because of integrated Office 365 suite as the suite also costs some money itself. Overall, OneDrive comes at a slightly larger price than its competitors but offers Office 365 suite, which is also a great feature.

Security

And here I encountered the worst feature of this cloud storage. Believe it or not, OneDrive basically has no special security! I don’t know how, but Microsoft really can’t afford such drawbacks. While uploading and downloading files, you have an SSL 128-bit encryption, which is also a cheap and not-that-great solution. On the other side, the files that are uploaded have no extreme protection, and that’s very problematic if you are planning to upload some important business data or data of any kind.

So, how do you protect your files here? I’m not happy to say it, but the best way to do that is by using the third-party apps for protection. Some of them work really well, but again, why do we have to do that? If I am paying for a cloud space, I also want the security to be tight and reliable. In my opinion, this is the biggest drawback of OneDrive, so you’ll want to use it for not-that-important files and data.

Verdict

I can’t say that I hate OneDrive, but I must admit that I’m not that impressed with it. It’s on my PC on Windows 10, but I barely make any interaction with it, aside from this review, where I used it. Personally, I wouldn’t stick around too much with OneDrive, as it’s a little expensive, and since I need some business files transferred on daily basis, I don’t want to risk with the security. You can use the free 5 GB version of the service, but 5 GB is a very little space to make use of, so don’t expect too much from it. On the other side, the paid subscriptions are also shallow and don’t offer too much. In my final opinion, OneDrive represents a mixed bag of both good and bad features, that left me uninspired, indifferently, and searching for better cloud service to use.

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