Showing the bare drive costs vs gross income is apples and oranges. There are other costs, drive controllers, servers, processors, electricity, network connections, staff infrastructure, software/development of client software, generators, support costs, etc. Probably, the first year expenses will about break even if they are lucky. The following years they should start making money.

This will probably be just the beginning. People will have all their important programs on their personal computers, and keep all their media on servers, to be accessed from wherever they please. With WiMax you could access your whole 50GB on the road theoretically. Imagine your car being able to sync up with your music, movies or even games from a WiMax connection and using that media for the rear seat entertainment. This will be a great future for Google and any other company that decides to jump on in.

..or month?

[iSuppli assumes it will offered for free to the user in a 50 GB version. -ed]

Google keeps on chugging. You go Google!

Unlike their email, with gives you an astounding amount of space but with a lame attatchment limit gimping it, i assume if they give us 50GB base, even for free, they wouldnt do something silly like ad an attatchment limit will they? Because if they do that would make it very lame.

Wouldn't make any sence for a storage service.

Google could be subpoena to scan for copyright infringements.

Just as service providers have been surrender customer info to MIAA. Then it will really be an open shut case since we are not allow to duplicate our purchased media.

Not to mention just as a workers have been caught stealing and selling personal information from credit cards being produced to just name, address and email addresses. It's too tempting.

You'd be begging for someone to be snooping around your data at all your docs, excel, jpg, mpegs etc. It's too damn tempting because someone is taking the time to upload the crap they definitely have something valuable.

And please don't tell me they wouldn't, you have sicko's going through so-called famous peoples garbage for any bit of information.

dual layer dvd's is cheap and so is massive HD's. I can't think of a legit reason why someone would use this, but that's just my opinion.

I'm willing to hear an argument for it. I would just say 'No Way Not My Data'.

sure the cost on paper looks good, but I bet it hasn't gone to the IT guru's of how much bandwidth this will require, think about it, you stick 4.2 million people using something, and access to 50GB of data, thats going to be alot of data transfered. They are going to need to seriously upgrade their connections, or if they use Akamai get some serious cost rise for their use of bandwidth from this on top of the cost for the drives. Not to mention cost of powering the devices, servers to run them, etc etc etc.

When Google gets their hands on that, bandwidth will be in their backyard. It's all starting to make a lot of sense to me. Also with the WGA strike going on, a lot of advertisers are pulling their big bucks from tv to the internet. All extra cash to fund Google and it's insanity.

Data encryption is applied at least on all stored data otherwise, it is too risky for Google to "leak" any data by their employee. So, you are safe mostly.

Yes you are right that the bandwidth cost is enormous if 50 gigs is downloaded all day long. There will be some who will use all 50 gigs within the first day... loading up all there precious junk. But for the most part, I can only see most people uploading (patiently) 1 to 2 gigs tops. Web Hosting companies these days offer Gigs upon gigs of server space and bandwidth for $10-$30/mo these days. But having worked with hosting companies, 80% of most websites use less than 10% of the space and bandwidth.

Then there are people like me... I don't like the idea that someone else has physical possession of my data. So I'll probably sign up for the service to store very very low sensitive data like family pics to share, BBQ recipes, word document on how to remove ketchup from linen, etc.

The hard drive on my main computer just crashed. Almost all of my critical files I have backed up on the computer I am using now.

I did loose a lot of non sensitive data, though. This could have been prevented if I had a better backup method or if I had been using Gdrive.

Someone will probably come up with a method of backing up to Gdrive. I feel that is the future, unless ISP's start holding the internet for ransom(some are already).

In addition to what has already been mentioned above regarding bandwidth, power (costs for which will be tremendous, just think about keeping 210,000 spindles going at any given time), and management costs, iSuppli fails to calculate usable versus raw storage. Unless Google intends not to replicate, stripe, or mirror any of the data (criminally bad idea), they'll need to buy at least 30% more disks.

No, not everyone will consue the full free allotment, but neither will all of them be generating substantial (or any) revenue. I, for one, am probably not going to click on the Travelocity ad next to the draft of my book on Iraq war crimes...

The 700 mhz frequency band and internet bandwidth are two completely different things.

I don't have much use for remote access to my data (and that's what the VPN tunnel back to the office is for), and encrypted or not I don't trust anyone else with my data, and I've got (lessee) almost 1.5TB on my NAS drive, but I can see if having some utility, and I can definitely see the Sheeple flocking to it.

I can see some utility for offsite backups, but the security issue is definitely non-trivial. Don't forget, while you can change your encryption keys, you can't change the keys on the data you stored in the past, as someone might have made a copy of the old data encrypted with the old key, so when they break your old key, they have your old data.

And then redundancy, reliability, bandwidth all become important...

It is a good idea for those who carry laptops and not want sensitive data on it in case it is stolen or have the online storage for backups in case the computer fails or for ease of access anywhere there is an internet connection. I think it is a good idea. It would be great if it was $50 per year.

PoorPoorGuy - "Data encryption is applied at least on all stored data otherwise, it is too risky for Google to "leak" any data by their employee. So, you are safe mostly."

First of all a couple of companies have put out outstanding rewards for anyone able to break their fullproof encryption. And guess what they refused to pay the so-called millions offered when it was broken.

People are too funny, I've seen MAC users claim mac OS can't be broken, or hacked yada yada yada
I guess I'm the barer of bad news...

Nothing is safe in the internet world, it can be safer but never safe. There are many ways to have your information exposed and stolen. And identity theft is at an all time high, just take some time and read what is going on around you, here the nightmare stories of victims not in the tens or hundreds of thousands. We are talking millions here and it is DOCUMENTED cases.

In my scenario I discussed employees and other people internally to google that may have the ability to access data.

If you do some research many employees have taken what you deem as "too risky" jump and did things with personal data. You can't pay people $7 to $12 and expect NO ON to not be tempted by a possibility to steal and get away with hundreds of thousands.

HIPPA was put out there in an effort to make companies clean up their act, however there is nothing in place to make anything 100% fool proof.

As an example many disgruntled employees have did many regretful things and some non regretful. I wont take the time to post the various stories here but employees working for credit card companies have been caught supplying information to identity theft rings.

There are people from other countries such as Nigeria, Ghana, Antigua, Mexico etc that attain jobs here in the USA and help the rings back home. What is there punishment when caught deportation? Many have fled to their native country well after the crimes have been committed.

Here are just two links because for some reason people on this site shoot from the hip and wont take the time to perform research.

http://209.85.165.104/search?q=cache:_nA_xI4myQ8J:www.cbsnews.com/stories/2001/05/15/60II/main291415.shtml identity theft stories&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=5&gl=us

http://209.85.165.104/search?q=cache:jVSY7sm0BvwJ:www.cbsnews.com/stories/2005/02/25/eveningnews/consumer/main676597.shtml identity theft stories&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=4&gl=us

I mean come on people if our military labs have been hacked and had people's name, address, SSN and date of birth stolen what do you think they would do with google's information.

AND PLEASE DON'T TELL ME GOOGLE HAS MORE SECURITY THAN THE US MILITARY LABS SHEESH...

www.tgdaily.com/content/view/35188/112/

LOL, first of all it would take a shorter time performing back up of 50 gig to regular CD's than having the average USA upload of 64k to 768k performed. You could and should dup those disk and store in different locations.

$50 over 5 years = $250

A 500 gig HD for under $100 and 5 year warranty. A few companies even include platter retrieval for lost data during the warranty period.

So a raid could be done.

Someone could also use Blu ray back up, more expensive but works and holds much more per disk.

If you are working for a company and using your laptop, most companies WONT allow you to store their information on external drives such as this.

And if you own a company and plan to store that information you'd better get a consent form releasing you and your company from liability should something happen.

Because you could get hit with a multi-million dollar suit, legal fees and fines if something ever goes wrong. And you would have no right to sue google because I can assure you they wont guarantee safe data keeping.

And the ones that do state it will have a ton of fine print and loopholes. like the radar companies that guarantee you wont ever get a speeding ticket. The when you get hit with POP, they back out and say "prove you was using the detector". Leaving owners scratching their head on how can they prove it.

If you house music or video you could be sued for copyright issues since software, music, movies etc aren't supposed to be copied.

So what is left to store if the above could be deemed illegal google use. And if business data can't be used or shouldn't be used.

"of 50 gig to regular CD's "

I meant regular dvd's sorry

is there a way to contact google team?
i'm an unluck user who can't install google earth (i do not have admin privileges) , i would like to beg google team to avoid to distribute an installation software for gdrive (if it will come) that needs admin's priv...