Onedrive's downloading speed is tremendously slow

I think it's interesting that there are so many forums posts about this topic, and, every time it seems that a Microsoft support agent chimes in with all these tips for the end user to try to improve performance, seemingly implying (or outright saying) that the issue is not Microsoft but rather that customer.

Let's be very clear here, the issue is Microsoft and it is throttling. Not only that, but Microsoft very clearly says that they throttle OneDrive and Sharepoint. Hopefully this helps folks at least in understanding what the issue is and stops people from needlessly troubleshooting their own setup ad infinitum.

Here are a couple Microsoft published resources on the topic. Note, these pages largely refer to Sharepoint (or Sharepoint Online) but make no mistake that this encompasses the OneDrive service as well (as OneDrive and Sharepoint are largely the same and are overlapping in feature and function).

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepointmigration/sharepoint-online-and-onedrive-migration-speed https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepoint/dev/general-development/how-to-avoid-getting-throttled-or-blocked-in-sharepoint-online

Of particular note, a few key pieces you may want to take away from these published pages:

• We have implemented tighter throttling limits on background apps (migration, DLP and backup solutions) during weekday daytime hours. You should expect that these apps will achieve very limited throughput during these times. However, during evening and weekend hours for the region, the service will be ready to process a significantly higher volume of requests from background apps.
• Can Microsoft turn off the throttle to help me with migration? No. Throttling is in place to protect the reliability and availability of the service. Throttling rules cannot be disabled or suspended.

I can confirm from considerable experience doing many company migrations and integrations that the throttling eases during evening and weekend hours.

I have the same problem. Tried different internet connections and the problem persists. I am now using Google Drive and Dropbox to download other files, and I can download with the speed going over 25MB/s, but OneDrive limits the download rate at 1MB/s maximum.

I will definitively cancel my One Drive subscription because it makes impossible to work properly managing the files...

Having the same problem, the org I work for shifted to Onedrive a few years back. We are now shifting to Google as being a no-profit, we get a lot of space for free, but trying to download the files is all over the place. I grabbed a few multi-gigabyte folders earlier today and got sort of reasonable speeds. At the moment I'm pulling down another one and getting around 5Mb/s on a 140Mb/s link.

The quality of MS's service is just rubbish, and they clearly are either deliberately reducing download speeds for large transfers to prevent people moving services, or they just have sh!tty bandwidth and have no clue what they are doing. Either way, they aren't competent to hold other people's data.

Presented without comment.

(i lied, here's a comment. 1.1 MB/s is 9Mbps)

![](https://learn-attachment.microsoft.com/api/attachments/ac578f83-390e-47cb-92f7-7bcf6eea5ae5?platform=QnA

i swtiched from google drive to onedrive because they offered me oodles of storage for free. now i understand why.

narrator: "it was not a good deal"

I have the same problem, my download speed from google drive is between 80 to 100mbps but one drive is downloading at 60klbps or less. For example, i've tried to download a single 1.58GB file from work for the past 3 days without success. What might be the issue? and its not internet connection, nor drive space, i double checked both. I downloaded a file from other cloud storage providers with no issue but I'm yet to complete one download from OneDrive