So, you lost that USB thumb drive, eh? Or maybe you just never got around to getting one of those hefty devices – or you always forget to bring that stuff! It’s alright – Web 2.0 brings ADrive to you, with – dig this – 50 GIGABYTES of storage for free. This presents a few concerns – sure they’ve got enough storage, but will the speed be able to match those of USB thumb drives? And will it be consistently available, or will their servers not be reliable enough for all that traffic? Lastly, will someone be able to access your account and steal everything?

First, addressing the speed, I got about 179kb/s in the second it took to upload my file up to ADrive. However, while uploading a larger file, I saw a significant decrease in speed as time progressed, till around a constant rate of 60kb/s. A reasonable speed, especially for a free service – although it might take a while when it comes to file sizes with gigabytes. As for downloading – I found rate to be twice the upload, so around 100kb/s – a bit on the slow side, but it’s still in it’s beta stages.

For the couple of days I’ve been using ADrive, I’ve been able to access it 24/7, both at school when I need data and at home when I do the homework.

Lastly, ADrive forces you to create a password with a few complicated measures – which I was glad to see, as this information could be confidential (not mine, unless you’re planning to steal homework – oh no!). However, I’d like to have seen a few more security measures, but maybe I’m just being plain ol’ paranoid. The lack of is understandable, as it would be pretty inconvenient for its users, on second thought.

The mentality I had towards this relatively new service was the same I had towards GMail a couple of years ago – this sounds too good to be true, but I’m going to give it a shot anyway. Hopefully you’re not too skeptical of this service, and you grow to enjoy such a convenience as I did.

Visit: http://www.adrive.com/