News April 24, 2012

Google Announces Google Drive with 5GB Free Storage

In one of the worst kept recent tech secrets, Google today announced Google Drive featuring 5GB of free storage. Here are some details:

Today, we’re introducing Google Drive—a place where you can create, share, collaborate, and keep all of your stuff. Whether you’re working with a friend on a joint research project, planning a wedding with your fiancé or tracking a budget with roommates, you can do it in Drive. You can upload and access all of your files, including videos, photos, Google Docs, PDFs and beyond.

The focus is on sharing, storing, and searching. Everything. Google Docs is built in so you can start creating stuff. You can install the desktop client on Windows or Mac to get a folder going.

You can get started with 5GB of storage for free—that’s enough to store the high-res photos of your trip to the Mt. Everest, scanned copies of your grandparents’ love letters or a career’s worth of business proposals, and still have space for the novel you’re working on. You can choose to upgrade to 25GB for $2.49/month, 100GB for $4.99/month or even 1TB for $49.99/month. When you upgrade to a paid account, your Gmail account storage will also expand to 25GB.

Perhaps the biggest surprise for me was availability:

Note that it is currently available for select Google accounts only; however, if you are not one of the chosen accounts, you can sign up to be notified when it becomes available to you.

And, of course, MY Drive was not ready. The surprise is that this is GOOGLE, infamous for ‘release now, finish later’ as a core business model. Google Music has spent a year in the open being totally craptastic for all to see and no one seemed to care … so I wonder if this is a sign that Google is taking responsibility to their users seriously. Nah, more likely they are just optimizing the monetization algorithms!

Head to Google Drive to see if YOUR Drive is ready!

Tags: Cloud Computing, Google

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About Michael Anderson

View all posts by Michael Anderson

I have loved technology for as long as I can remember - and have been a computer gamer since the PDP-10! Mobile Technology has played a major role in my life - I have used an electronic companion since the HP95LX more than 20 years ago, and have been a 'Laptop First' person since my Compaq LTE Lite 3/20 and Powerbook 170 back in 1991! As an avid gamer and gadget-junkie I was constantly asked for my opinions on new technology, which led to writing small blurbs ... and eventually becoming a reviewer many years ago. My family is my biggest priority in life, and they alternate between loving and tolerating my gaming and gadget hobbies ... but ultimately benefits from the addition of technology to our lives!

Dan Hamilton

And this makes Google Drive a non-starter for me: http://techie-buzz.com/tech-news/google-drive-another-privacy-disaster.html
Doug Miller

This slow rollout is pretty common with Google, actually – they did the same with GMail, Wave, etc., and when they rollout interface changes to Gmail, for example, I always see them days after everybody else. I never did get that gray top navigation bar on Google pages a few months ago, for example – they had changed back to the black bar by the time that I got it.
gorkon

I wad lucky and I got in right away.
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Great future with Google drive with using 5GB free space. We can easily store our data as well as immediately share them with peoples. This may be definitely worked for students and business holder peoples.