Ridge

Speculation about an online hard drive from Google (Gdrive) is now rife. The concept is that most files will be stored online, obviating the need for an ever-increasing local HDD or SSD. Presumably, software will start to be written for an online ‘operating system’, building on the progress of Google Docs.

As a professional photographer, the prospect of cheap offsite storage for my archive, Picasa software to rival Photoshop and a very lightweight laptop to access it all from is intriguing, especially the speed aspect: sending a browser instruction to a bank of quad-xeons with terabytes of RAM in California to manipulate an image should be much faster than cranking it out on my Core 2 laptop here at home. So not only offsite storage, but offsite processing too.

Storage costs ~ 7p (~ 10¢) per gigabyte. The time and cost of upgrading could take that up to ~ 25p (35¢). Given that uploading will be slow in the near future, the Gdrive could charge out at ~ 0.7p (~ 1¢).