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Comment by gte910h | Hacker News Reader

I've heard Google Drive best described as "Dropbox for those whom time is free".

No kidding... my first sync basically made my PC useless for a good week. Over 1GB of memory and 100% processor usage for around 8 days to sync 35 GB of data.

I haven't had any problems with it yet (as a single user); I have had weird problems with dropbox when shared with lots of users actively editing files (conferences). Not really apples to apples comparison, true.

I briefly considered switching to Google Drive when it was released. I copied all the files in my Dropbox (57GB) to the GDrive folder and waited for everything to sync.

After syncing, the GDrive client constantly used almost 500MB (yes, 0.5GB) of memory while Dropbox was always under 50MB (Windows 7)[1]. That's a huge deal for a program that's supposed to be always running.

Also, the GDrive client often crashed while syncing and had problems syncing some weirdly named files that Dropbox handled perfectly.

I hope GDrive gets over these issues soon, since they have some cool features (e.g. webapp integration, content-based image indexing).

[1] https://twitter.com/jtuulos/status/211702650109046785

Your right about the absurd use of memory by Gdrive. However, looking at my usage right now, my Google Chrome instances each use about as much as my GDrive, which for me is not a huge tradeoff, as Gdrive is just as useful to me as one of those Google Chrome instances.

http://puu.sh/Hplk

I did the exact same thing, and had the same experience. Crashes, flakiness, slowness, and extreme resource use (RAM/CPU/bandwidth).

The (up) sync time was also about 10 times that of Dropbox.

Maybe they've fixed things, but the experience was pretty horrible all around.

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