I wonder what effect metered internet usage will have on this...

Interesting idea. I would enjoy having a virtual hard drive to use over the inernet. Just like a partition on a HDD but online on someone's server.

None for me, as far as I know Cox in Phoenix hasn't enabled any bandwidth limitations. If they had I would know by now.

Yeah but the question is, will they care if I upload my massive porn collection and watch streaming video of gangbangs?

"More and more people are starting to move the bulk of their data off the desktop and into servers "in the cloud," where it's accessible from any computer or mobile device and easily shareable with friends and family."

Um... I've moved in the opposite direction.

I'll care if your habits cost me money (e.g. the carrier or storage provider ups rates because of overall/average usage).

i dont trust the clod, that sidekick incident was warning enough

dood i just bought a 24tb sata nas with 3 years next day for less than 9k. thats way better than havin google hold my junk.

I wouldn't put any incriminating files on the online storage but for normal stuff like music or photo collections it would make a mobile file sharing system. Much easier than Emailing myself files everywhere I go.

"16 TB Cloud Drive from Google Costs $4.1K/Year"

Actually, it costs $4.0K/Year, since $4.00 * 1024 = $4096.00.

Seriously, you can throw together your own fully redundant raid system with the same specs for considerably less, even after you factor in electricity usage. A RAID-5 box that connects to eSATA is 300 on the cheap. Add 8x2TB for 1360 (170 ea) and you have yourself 16 terabytes of storage for initial cost of around 1750 after shipping, and it will use maybe $100-200 electricity per year.

Savings through 5 years (assuming one hard drive failure per year): about $16,000. Can I be paid my savings in SmartCars please?

I don't get it. I can buy a 2TB HDD for $180 from newegg. I could have about 45 TB of hard drive space to own instead of leasing 16TB from google for a year... And I would get to store things besides photos...

Why would I do this? At all?

I agree, especially after the mass deletion of gmail emails a couple years ago. I'll backup my own files, thanks. Just gotta make sure that you keep a backup offsite in case of fire or whatever... But yeah I'm a control freak sometimes.

My question is, did I read that right, the cloud storage is locked to either gmail or picasa? Who could possibly want 16TB of emails and pictures? For 16TB I'd expect database hosting or web/ftp hosting or maybe network drive mapping with file/directory level security restrictions... Dunno, maybe I'm missing something.

I'm not a fan of the idea. I like to know exactly what my data is stored on. ie 2x2TB WD HDDs in raid 1

20GB for $5 a year seems pretty reasonable for someone who wants to back up pictures/files at an offsite location, not sure about security though.

lol, only Google would charge in powers of 2. I assume this price includes ALOT of bandwidth too? 4k seems a ripoff otherwise. I'm sure you could build your own raid array with 16TB of redundant space, and power it for a year for less than 4k.

If you had a 1 megabyte upload (8 megabits), it would take you 6 months to upload 16 TB of storage.

Yes cause money and data are measured the same way

Space to setup and store it, the electricity needed to run them at home, the cost of the case and controllers needed to actually connect all of those. It takes a lot more then just 4k worth of drives to make them usable.

OK, so I can:
1) Upload my data to Google. Google will sell my data and internet usage stats for profit. Google may or may not protect my data from intruders, but will certainly have a line in the contract absolving them of any liability for theft of my data. Google will charge me upwards of $4000 a year for 16TB of data, which will no doubt increase as time passes. Google will lock me out of my own data if I am late on payments. OR
2) Purchase forty 1TB hard drives for about $4000. Put those 40 drives in RAID1, yielding 20TB worth of data with a failsafe against data loss. These drives will last 5+ years with a statistically insignificant increase to my electricity bill. The data on these drives will be in my possession and no one can lock me out of it.
WHY WOULD ANYONE BUY THIS CRAP???

Camikzi, when was the last time you build a RAID array or NAS storage? The hardware is dirt cheap. I can set up a 16TB array for well under $4000 and it wont have anywhere near the maintenance costs of Google's 4K/yr "cloud." Oh and Google's "cloud" is really just a carbon pumping data center in the Inland Empire or some other low-rent suburban sprawl.

I wonder what kind of warranty they provide on your data for that price. Since we all know how reliable HDD's can be. I'd be pretty pissed to pay $4k a year to have it all disappear from a HDD failure.

But I can see many companies using this kind of storage. The big issue would be when your or their internet was down... and you suddenly cannot access your files for the day. Man, that would suck.

You sir, fail at math. Brush up on your rounding numbers.

LOL @ the inevitable poster who has to compare enterprise level, multi site replicated SAN solutions to a pile of junk SATA drives on sale at Newegg.

Also to the person scared of 'clouds', keep in mind Gmail and Sidekick issues had everything to do with database failures and not access to SAN storage being sold by the GB. It is like saying "I'm scared of coffee because I read a news article where someone got sick after drinking hot chocolate once". 'Cloud' is just a buzz word, and can encapsulate many things.

I wonder if they offer Backup solutions (and security) like Iron Mountain. If they do, Then 4.1K/year for 16T is peanuts. Iron Mountain charges $350/year for 20G and $100/year for 5G

for that price, you can buy 55TB worth of storage and use 16 1TB drives for primary storage, and another 16 for backup and the remaining 23 drives for backups of the backups.

I think its also good to point out that a divergence in the marketplace is happening here: those who store on the cloud, and those who store locally.

I've always considered myself a "tech buff" who has the latest and greatest when I can. As storage becomes cheaper, I've just been adding more locally. Some of my "tech buff" friends have 16 terabytes of storage (or more) in a mirrored backup. That actually costs less than Google's 16 terabyte online storage.

But as the article pointed out, there are those moving their data online. I'd refer to these people as more "layman" in their approach to data storage: the easier it is, the better. Its not complex, but still more than what people want to handle, to get a mirrored backup running in large quantities of storage. Many would rather pay even Google's $4000 price to store online rather than learn how to store that much, securely, themselves.

or better yet, spend $2560 for 32TB of storage, then spend another $600 for a high end safe thats fire proof and extremely strong then properly fill it with padding then put 16 of the drives in there and then keep that as backup

it offers good data protection and best of all it wont use any of your upload or download bandwidth

or save the $600 and use truecrypt on the drives then store them as another house where someone else in your family lives

16TB for $4,096 hum... that's $256 per TB or $0.25 per GB for only storage... THAT'S a very cheap option for those who need that much storage

Yes, but can it play Crysis... I mean, can it host Pirate Bay?

1TB drive $80 x16 = $1280 1 time cost and you get 5-10 years of service out of the drive ($1280 today, 5 years later, still $1280)

google initial money 16TB $4096 (after 5 years $20,480 )

which seems cheaper to you?

learn how to store your own data and save $2816 on the initial purchase and save much more in the long run.