Free cloud-storage is something more and more people are looking for these days. With Dropbox, Box.net, Google Drive and more fighting for the top spot. Today Google’s pulled a big move to beat the competition and have just tripled what they’ll be giving away for free. Previously, just like Dropbox and others, Google Drive users received 5GB of free cloud storage. Starting today that will triple to 15GB.
The excellent news arrived this afternoon from the official Google Drive blog, and they detail just exactly why they’ve decided to go this route – without really giving us any tips as to if there’s a reason. Instead of enjoying 5GB free, you’ll get 15GB, but that will also be shared across Gmail, Drive, and Google+ Photos.
So while this is technically more Google Drive storage, they aren’t actually giving any additional storage out, but we’ll be able to use it where it counts. As it is right now Gmail users get 10GB, and 5GB is shared between Drive and Google+ Photos. Now, you’ll be able to have a unified 15GB of cloud-storage. So for users like me, who’s Gmail is only using about 1-2GB, you can use that other 9GB over on Google Drive. So essentially Google isn’t giving us more, they’ve just unified it into one pool and we can use our storage as we need or see fit.
Oh and if you’d like to beef that up to something more manageable for your needs they have that too. 100GB will run you $4.99 and more details on that can be found here. So now we’re wondering if there’s a reason for this. Why announce it just two days before Google I/O that starts on Wednesday? Could they be related? Obviously we’ll hear plenty about Google+ at IO, so stay tuned and we’ll report back as we’ll be there live!
SOURCE: Google Blog
So. Cool. I’m not a huge fan of cloud storage as it requires an always connected approach but it is quite useful for many things.
Does that mean it’s almost leaving 2010 now?
Hey,
I feel something wrong in TITLE. As you also mentioned, they are not at all increasing the storage but just merging Gmail and GDrive storage Gmail already offers around 10GB storage and Gdriver is of 5GB. So totalling around 15GB.
Thanks
Ganesh
I just logged into my Google account and I’m still only getting the 10GB in mail and 5GB elsewhere. Do I need to do something special to get this new plan?
Nothing changed at all. Still 5gb gdrive and 10 gamail