Google drops prices for cloud storage

Google has announced that it is to drop the price of extra storage for Gmail and Picasa power-users to 20GB for $5 a year up to a whopping 16 terabytes.

Extra storage has been available for Google services for two years, but the internet giant has doubled the amount of data you can store in the cloud for around £3.

Gmail started with 1GB of storage, although this has steadily crept up to the stage where users have more than seven gigs to play with.

But for users of Picasa, photos eat into those limits a little quicker than the average newsletter or parental missive, and people do occasionally need extra storage.

Overflow

"This extra storage acts as an overflow that you only start using when you reach the limit of your free storage, and is shared for use between Gmail and Picasa Web Albums," states Google.

"Picasa has always come with a gigabyte of free storage to share photos, but people need even more storage as they start taking more pictures and moving full resolution backups of their photo collection into the cloud."

Dropping costs

"While storage costs have been dropping naturally, we've also been working hard to improve our infrastructure to reduce costs even further," adds the blog

"Today, we're dramatically lowering our prices to make extra storage more affordable. You can now buy 20 GB for only $5 a year, twice as much storage for a quarter of the old price, and enough space for more than 10,000 full resolution pictures taken with a five megapixel camera.

"And if you need more than 20 GB, you can purchase up to 16 terabytes!"

It's fair to say that even the most snap-happy customer would struggle to fill up 16 terabytes.