Google's Drive SLASH, secret 'big upgrade': Coincidence? Hardly Google has slashed its online Drive storage prices so fast, it undercuts all of its rivals – and its own products. The Reg suspects the web king will dramatically lower its infrastructure-as-a-service storage prices as well in two weeks. The dramatic price cut for Google Drive was announced on Thursday: storing 100GB of data …
You can buy 7200 RPM 2TB drives for $75... buy a couple of those and a Kingwin Trayless Dock (under $20 on amazon)... set the drive controller to AHCI in BIOS (without AHCI you would have to reboot for the onboard controller to detect the new hard drive)... backup your data, and store it off site. e.g. store your backed up private data at the office and your backed up office data at home.
Replace half the backup drives once per year (most are warranted for 3).
maybe they are dropping the price because their product is a bit, well, shit compared to competitors. Dropbox has _never_ failed me, while the gdrive client has frequently (>2 times per week) decided to simply stop working without telling anyone.
Only reason I'm still with gdrive is I'm a cheapskate (and a bit invested in picasa), and maybe this pricing acknowledges the near-freetard spending profile of Google's users.
Storing a terabyte now costs $9.99 a month... Great! -- Well great- Privacy aside obviously! But tell me on my 5 MB connection (the fastest in my capital city), how can I ever take advantage of even 100GB of that?
There was a roundup of fast internet around the globe recently and its all in Asia, Eastern Europe, and north Europe (very north). So speed is not in mainland Europe or North America yet, and until we're all living in Google Towns on fibre connections, how the hell is anyone going to get to use this capacity?
Big data centres are still accepting hard drives by post to be hosted rather than slowmo uploads, and this confirms the problem. But maybe this is all future proofing and the data is being mostly downloaded from existing hard drives that are FedEx'd in.... But if you need to upload what then? Someone enlighten me....
And the big problem with North America and to a lesser extent continental Europe has simply been geography. To maintain high-speed rates from coast to coast in the US requires high-speed links all the way down, which means running them across vast rural areas, big rivers, and one or two significant mountain ranges. I recall Europe can have foibles of its own if data links have to cross places like the Alps. The obvious question: who foots the bill when the customer is price-sensitive?
Google has 19 fibers at 10Tbit/sec each and multiple ways of connecting Google Server Farms all across the US. Moreover, Google is continually making its Farms more efficient. Googles reliability and speed are setting the pace for the entire net. This is not a price war. It's an engineering war with the declaration of war: "Get your engineering act together or perish."
"....Googles reliability and speed are setting the pace for the entire net. This is not a price war. It's an engineering war...." Yes, it's an engineering war, and Google have realized they can't win an engineering war, so they are going to try and kill the more competent competition with a price war instead.
I totally agree with you! And I do not understand why in the U.S. we leave it to big business to plan where and how our national infrastructure is deployed, updated and repaired!!
I mean companies are only in this 'gig' for the profit potential for their shareholders - not patriotism or 'goodwill'. A President has 8 years max to work on anything before he is out and the reigning Congressional party in House and Senate changes constantly.
And my point is: in order to plan for future infrastructure for the nation: i.e. broadband, highways, railways, airlinks - one needs for rational and patriotic Americans to sit down and adopt at least a 20 year time-frame so that projects can be completed properly and not cancelled in mid-stream. Anything else, puts the American citizen as an 'after-thought' to the projects 'big business' decides to fund! Please enough already, can we use some common sense here!
I love Google Drive, having tried many different products before settling on this one. Being on the 9.99 a month deal, the storage boost is a welcome addition, but I think it'll be a while before I get anywhere close to filling that up.
However, I still think they need to add more functionality, such as:
* Selective syncing. I don't want to have to sync everything on each machine; just a little on each. Syncplicity has the right idea.
* File deltas (versioning). They kinda have this with their own document formats, but it should be available on all file types, like several other cloud storage specialists.
* Full system backup, and not just my documents, or items in my Google Drive folder.
Overall, great pricing/storage combo, but still lacking on the features front.
They also need to attach a document to email by default, rather than a link to the drive copy.
I don't want people to see subsequent edits to a document. I have to be endlessly aware that they can now see EVERYTHING I type into it :-(
It's a right old faff to download the document first, and then attach it.
Dan, I also use GDrive, and some of the missing functionality you mentioned is already there.
1. Selective syncing: There is a selective sync option in the GDrive preferences. You just tick the folders you want to get backed up. I suppose if you want only certain file types then you would be out of luck, so I agree they could do with adding more functionality here.
2. File deltas (Versioning): While there is no versioning on the Google Drive folder on the PC, you can go onto the Google Drive Web folder and right-click any file and choose 'manage revisions', then you can download or restore older versions of the file. Saved my ass the other day!
3. Full system backup: This ones a bit trickier, but on my system I just move a folder to my Google Drive and create a hard link in Windows from the original location using the 'mklink' command. The only downside is if you have a small hard drive (SSD perhaps) and you want to backup files from a large secondary partition, you can't really do it, as the files have to physically exist in the Google Drive folder.
You don't think they already do that?
Global de-duping seems to be the basis of the Play Music service, where your uploaded stuff is supposedly "converted" to a standard bitrate MP3 format. Does anybody really expect them to convert all the ripped CDs, WAV, FLAC and odd bit rate MP3's? I'm betting on uploading, scanning and track recognition, at which point they throw away the upload and grant you access to the archive version of the track.
I'm betting on uploading, scanning and track recognition
Yes, that's what they do a lot of the time. They are quite open about it, and tout it as a feature: The GMusic client uploads song recognition data, which is then checked angainst their DB. If it is recognised, it doesn't bother uploading the file and just uses their copy, saving upload time, unless you specifically tell it otherwise (e.g. when they've got it wrong).
They might run dedupe on specific datasets, but the example you gave - uploading audio to the Play Music service - definitely would not use dedupe, it performs psychoacoustic fingerprinting to the file, and only uploads if it does not already have a match for it.
Dedupe is insanely expensive computationally, you need a really good dataset for it to be useful.
I'm afraid I am still very skeptical about the cloud being a primary storage mechanism. I still go to many places with flaky internet or data connections that it makes downloading anything beyond a photo a complete pain. Also, since the Snowden revelations I simply do not trust any of these providers to keep my data secure. I use Google Drive as a backup mechanism only, i.e. I primarily use local storage but back my data up to Google Drive (within encrypted TrueCrypt containers of course to keep out any nosy people trying to look at my data).
Similar here. I have both GDrive and Dropbox, GDrive for collaboration docs, and Dropbox as an sync tool and to give me access to items on my phone, at work etc.
But they only cover a specific subset of files, and anything important goes into TrueCrypt.
My main backup is a FreeNAS setup with 4TiB of local storage (mirrored), full system backups etc.
The important stuff (i.e. things I can't just rip or download again) also get written to DVD or to an external HD which lives at the GFs house (and I have her's at mine).
Or go for Jottacloud, which are based in Norway and host your data there too. 5GB free, and an extra 5GB free if you use a referrer link:
http://www.jottacloud.com/signup?referer=6D5E666793C785B3C86EA8D57572B7EA
They do 100GB a month for $6 if you're interested, or $6 a month for unlimited storage from one machine, and have all the usual clients (Windows, Mac, iOS, Android) but not Linux.
You can still pick up a decent 1TB drive for about 60 dollars, working out to the low price of $5 a month over a year versus Google's $9.99.
This is why you are a journalist and not an engineer or an accountant. Your drive costs you $5 a month, but you have not taken in to account the costs of the server to put it in, the electricity to power it, and the network connection to make it accessible. You would also normally buy hard drives that last a bit longer than a year, so running the depreciation over one year seems unnecessary.
"This is why you are a journalist and not an engineer or an accountant."
Why bother with the content free attack on the author ?
"you have not taken in to account the costs of the server to put it in, the electricity to power it, and the network connection to make it accessible."
Those costs will vary wildly with the use-case. In the (very common) case of some random joe who wants to back up a few files on his PC, the host for the hard drive is already there, the network connection isn't necessary and in practice the energy costs are lost in the noise in a typical household.
With Edward Snowden's revalations still ringing in our virtual ears, WHY is everyone so keen to let google have their entire digital lives??
Surely with phisical storage being so cheap (several people have already posted prices) why voulenteer to let 'them' in.
I'll never understand it, perhaps I'm old and out-of touch.......
At $35 per terabyte, which is Google's price for a 2TB drive, amortized over 4 years, that works out at a drive cost of $0.75 per month.
But it's much better than that! Compression and deduplication reduce stored data size by 85 percent in a business environment, so we are down to around 10 cents cost of the drive per month.
In the consumer space, compression isn't as good, due to the large number of images stored. Deduplication across users, however, is fantastic, if implemented. Reductions of 99 percent are possible.
There are more costs than drives of course, but bottom line, these prices could still go down further!
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