Google Rolls Out Online Storage Services

An anonymous reader writes "The associated press reports that Google is slated to provide online storage at a price. From the article: 'Web search and Internet services company Google Inc. on Friday began selling expanded online storage, targeted for users with large picture, music or video file collections. The prices range from $20 per year for 6 gigabytes of online storage; $75 per year for 25 gigabytes of storage; $250 per year for 100 gigabytes of storage; and $500 per year for 250 gigabytes of storage.' Is this too expensive for what there offering, or are you going to make use of it?"

Comments

Old new: It's called gmail

[Bomarc]

See: http://www.viksoe.dk/code/gmail.htm

Is that all they're offering?

[eln]

So I read the article, and all it says is that the stuff you store can be used with Google products like Picasa, Gmail, Google Docs, etc. But, can't anything I store on my own hard drive be uploaded to those apps too?

I can get 500 GB of local storage for $100, and I don't have to worry about what some corporation is going to do with my data. If the only "advantage" to Google's storage is that I can use it with their products, what's the point? Surely Google must have something more to offer than the article states. As it stands, this looks like a great deal if it were 1998, but not so much today.

Amazon S3

[Usquebaugh]

I use Amazon S3 through Gorilla Disk. I also use it directly through Python and Ruby.

Amazon has it right in this instance. The cost is less and is dynamic.

I'm looking at starting a small app hosting company and S3 will definitely work better than Google, my costs grow with my business, no upfront expenses etc.

Expensive and unreliable?

[FlyByPC]

For one, it's expensive; you could buy many times the storage by buying the hardware yourself; it would be cheaper to go with RAID-1 and replace the drives every year whether they needed it or not.

Also, even assuming that Google's new service is:

• trustworthy (I.E. they don't peek at your data),
• reliable,
• secure (hackerproof and disasterproof; aren't they based in CA?), and
• speedy (and it ain't ever gonna be as fast as a locally-attached HD)

...there's still the question of your own Internet connection; I for one don't want to lose access to my files every time my cable connection decides it needs a day off. It's been pretty reliable lately, but still.

On the "trustworthy" issue, I trust Google as much as just about any company -- but I don't trust anyone 100%, so why risk it?

Bottom line -- call me a dinosaur (OK, it fits; I enjoy BASIC and Assembler), but I'd rather do it myself.

Yeah, yeah, you say -- but what about portable storage? OK, I admit, this would be convenient -- but I still think the drawbacks (even money being no object) far outweigh bringing the data you need with you. Heck, for that money, you could seriously think about one of those new solid-state drives! How's that for reliability?