Today Amazon introduced a new service called Cloud Drive, with a companion Cloud Player service. It’s intended as a cloud based media storage and retrieval service. That means, for example, you can upload all your music to Cloud Drive and then play it through any web browser, anywhere. But how does it compare to Amazon’s base storage service, S3?
Well, they are the same and they are different. There are the same in that you upload your files to Amazon’s cloud. If your files happen to be photos, documents or video, the service is pretty much the same as S3; Amazon stores the files and you can access them video download links.
But if you’re uploading music, you’ll be able to play that music directly from your browser, using the Cloud Player feature of Cloud Files.
And the pricing is a little different than S3 too. For starters, you get 5GB of storage for free. After that, the pricing options range from $20 a year for 20GB of storage to $1,000 a year for 1TB of storage. They aren’t explicitly charging for bandwidth…just storage…though you can bet bandwidth is figured into the storage price.
So if you’re a music lover, it’s a service worth checking out. But if you plan on using it only for video, S3 essentially gives you the same thing and at a lower cost.
Full details are available here.