An announcement related to data storage and the cloud has come out of Mountain View today, and people who’ve never heard the word "GDrive" may be very impressed by it.  It’s possible that consumers who are familiar with the term will be extremely disappointed, however.

Here are the facts: Google Docs has received a significant upgrade insofar as users can now upload files of any type.  The cutoff point in terms of individual files’ sizes is a generous 250 MB, and each user gets a total of 1 GB of storage.  All for free, which could save a lot of students and professionals from having to buy thumbdrives.

The trouble is that this solution isn’t extremely economical if anyone needs more space.  Google intends to offer additional storage at the rate of $0.25 per GB per year, which isn’t going to strike fear into the hearts of hard drive manufacturers.

Indeed, since rumors about the GDrive tended not to associate it with caps and prices at all – and since, with Chrome OS on the way, it had started to seem more likely that Google would offer some sort of cloud storage solution to everyone – hard drive manufacturers may be breathing sighs of relief.

Anyway, the new storage feature will be rolled out "over the next few weeks," according to a post on the Official Google Docs Blog.

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