Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Save more with Google Drive

googleblog.blogspot.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

291–300 of 413 posts

Re: Save more with Google Drive

#291

Post by MichaelApproved »

fulafel wrote: post #243
eslaught wrote: post #238

What I find interesting about this is that the Google Drive is now significantly less expensive than Amazon S3, and even comparable to Amazon Glacier. Google Drive: $10/1000GB = $0.01/GB Amazon S3: $0.85/GB for the first 1 TB Amazon Glacier: $0.01/GB (all prices per month) This means that any service built on top of Amazon S3 will never be less expensive than Google Drive. Period. Sure, there are caveats. Google Driv…

Deduplication.

This is a big reason why service like Dropbox and Google Drive work so well. If two or more people have the same exact file in their drive, it doesn't take up more physical storage than the original file.

Re: Save more with Google Drive

#292

Post by pwg »

lstamour wrote: post #234
fletchowns wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I live in the Bay Area and I pay about $800/year for 120KB/s upload (AT&T U-Verse). Certainly no blackjack and hookers included.

And then I did the math and realised I pay $1735.54 per year for my cable Internet... 300 down / 20 up with a 1 TB cap doesn't come cheap when no competition exists at those speeds. If it were even offered in my area, fibre from the same company is north of $3000/year, and for that all I get is symmetric uplink. Still, at 300 down, 1 TB = 8388608 mbits / 300 mbits/s = 466 minutes or just under 8 hours. And luckily, m…

Verizon FIOS business class: 99.99/month. Essentially 1200/year.

50Mbit down - 50Mbit up - no data caps (or so they say).

And yes, I do (provided the other end is capable) see those speeds.

Re: Save more with Google Drive

#293

Post by aiiane »

driverdan wrote: post #280
beering wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Managing your risks is fair, but it's not clear that Google Drive is less reliable than Dropbox. 1) Google Drive is a fundamental part of their online office suite, which means it's used internally for day-to-day employee work. Reader, Wave, Finance didn't get that status. Not to mention that having paid enterprise plans means it's a bit more mature than other things. 2) In 5 years, Dropbox could very well be referre…

Wasn't Wave used quite a bit internally?

No, not really.

Re: Save more with Google Drive

#294

Post by alecdbrooks »

gtirloni wrote: post #209

They are offering a product at 1/10th of the price of their competitors. That comes at a cost. Customer support is already bad enough, my guess is the infrastructure isn't that great so they can price it cheaply. We wouldn't trust a cheap VPS provider with our data if they were offering storage at this price. What magical thing Google has that suddenly makes us all safe at this price point?

I would imagine hosting vast amounts of crawl data and email would give them plenty of experience building inexpensive storage at scale. Giving people vast amounts of space for email also gives them plenty of data on how much space people are likely to actually use.

Re: Save more with Google Drive

#295

Post by kalleboo »

jliptzin wrote: post #203

If nothing else this just exposes how high Dropbox's margins must be.

Dropbox is based on Amazon S3 which at their cheapest advertised rate costs 4x more than than what Google is offering. (although with Dropbox's usage they can probably get a volume discount)

I wonder if Dropbox have plans to start utilizing their own data center to get costs down...

Re: Save more with Google Drive

#296

Post by [deleted] »

simonsarris wrote: post #9

I think at this point I'm a little more comfortable paying more for a company that I know won't abandon this market. I know Dropbox will be Dropbox in 5 years. How can we be sure Google Drive won't be shuttered in less time? Google is very haphazard with their web properties. Sometimes they shutter them, sometimes they stuff them in the closet. Google Reader, Wave, etc, you know. the stories. What scares me more are…

[deleted]

Re: Save more with Google Drive

#297

Post by aragot »

barrkel wrote: post #136
watty wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not a betting man but if I had to put $1 on which service (Dropbox or Google Drive) would disappear first I'd bet Dropbox.

I'd probably bet on Google putting Dropbox out of business with competition, then getting rid of Drive because it's no longer a growth area.

This. The very obvious thing in the $10 terabyte offer is, Google wants Dropbox and all data hosters out of business.

So I trust that Dropbox _will_ be out of business very soon.

Re: Save more with Google Drive

#298

Post by balladeer »

simonsarris wrote: post #9

I think at this point I'm a little more comfortable paying more for a company that I know won't abandon this market. I know Dropbox will be Dropbox in 5 years. How can we be sure Google Drive won't be shuttered in less time? Google is very haphazard with their web properties. Sometimes they shutter them, sometimes they stuff them in the closet. Google Reader, Wave, etc, you know. the stories. What scares me more are…

Google (or read Company X with deep pockets) offers Dropbox N billion dollars and then Dropbox is no longer Dropbox that you are hoping to see in coming 5 years.

Re: Save more with Google Drive

#299

Post by dragonwriter »

robertlf wrote: post #288
simonsarris wrote: post #9

I think at this point I'm a little more comfortable paying more for a company that I know won't abandon this market. I know Dropbox will be Dropbox in 5 years. How can we be sure Google Drive won't be shuttered in less time? Google is very haphazard with their web properties. Sometimes they shutter them, sometimes they stuff them in the closet. Google Reader, Wave, etc, you know. the stories. What scares me more are…

I kind of agree with simonsarris. You take a risk if you rely on a company's product if that company doesn't rely on that product to stay in business. Dropbox lives and dies by its storage feature; Google doesn't.

> You take a risk if you rely on a company's product if that company doesn't rely on that product to stay in business.

You take a risk even if it does, because a company can change their business focus, or it can go out of business, or it can be acquired by another company that doesn't rely on the product, even if the acquired company did, and you have no control over any of those contingencies.

Re: Save more with Google Drive

#300

Post by lelandbatey »

jtchang wrote: post #28

It nags me that even at this great price I'm not jumping up and down to switch from Dropbox. Why is this? -- Once you start using Dropbox there are some serious network effects. It takes a lot of work to get all your friends (both work and personal) to move. -- Even though Google Drive is so much cheaper it just doesn't seem to have the usability of Dropbox. I find the web interface really hard to use for some reason…

For a while, I had Google Drive and Dropbox. That was when Gdrive was $5 for 100GB, and that price couldn't make me switch.

Seriously, Gdrive does not measure up to Dropbox. The Dropbox client is so, SO much lighter on system resources than the Gdrive client, it's stupid. I've had Gdrive end up sitting on 300+Mb of data while Dropbox happily ran with 50Mb.

As well, Google Drive has exactly one mode: on. There is next to no configuration, which led to some humorous situations.

At one point, I took down all the bandwidth at a Hackathon because Gdrive wanted to sync a bunch of files, and there's no way to limit network activity.

I do not like Gdrive, and honestly I don't feel like I need it. Their main selling point is cheapness, but my working data-footprint is only about 40GB, which fits nicely within my Dropbox account (and on my very small SSD's). I don't need, nor could I use 1TB of online space.

Post reply on HN