Today in TechGoogle Drive officially launches, offering 5GB of free cloud storage
The cloud storage wars are about to go nuclear: Google has officially entered the Dropbox-style cloud storage game. And its offering looks a lot like the competition, Dropbox and Microsoft SkyDrive.
Google Drive is a service that lets you store any file to the cloud as effortlessly as if you were saving it to your own computer. In that sense, Google Drive becomes like a folder on your hard drive capable of storing as much data as you're willing to pay for. And if your preferred price is "free," don't worry — Google Drive will offer you 5GB on the house, just for signing up.
In a sense, the announcement behind Google Drive is a bit confusing when you consider that the company has already introduced other cloud-centric services. But the new Google Drive is indeed different from the existing Google Play, cloud storage for music and movies; and Google Docs, a cloud service for the company's own suite of Microsoft Office replacement software.
Stacking up against the competition
The full review of Google Drive can't happen until we've all gotten hands-on time with the service and have seen how reliable access is in the coming weeks and months. Still, from what we know about the service so far, it's quite comparable to what's currently being offered by Dropbox and SkyDrive, Microsoft's cloud storage alternative the company re-launched yesterday.
So, which of these Drive-esque services is your best bet? If you care about free storage space, Microsoft SkyDrive actually comes out on top with a whopping 7GB of free storage, compared to 5GB for Google Drive, and just 2GB for Dropbox. For those who hunger for the maximum cloud storage space possible, Dropbox has some unlimited plans with its professional Teams service, but at $795 per year, unlimited space doesn't come cheap. Otherwise, $100 a year (give or take a dollar) will get you 50GB of space on Dropbox, while $50 spent on SkyDrive buys you 100GB of space.
This article was written by Fox Van Allen and originally appeared on Tecca
More from Tecca:
