A leaked draft release states that Google Drive will launch next week with 5 GB of free storage.
The Next Web reports that Google will open the doors to its online locker -- Google Drive -- next week, probably on Tuesday or Wednesday. The news arrives by way of a draft release from a Google partner who states that the virtual drive will come packed with 5 GB of free storage with an option to purchase more.
Like Dropbox, users will be able to manage their files on Google Drive within any web browser. But Google will also offer a downloadable app that will reportedly work within local file browsers on a Mac or Windows PC presumably the same way Dropbox's desktop client works. Whether files in this virtual locker can be accessed or not from other Google services is still unknown.
On Monday TechCrunch said it actually acquired and installed the Mac version of the app, reporting that it launched successfully but was unable to connect to the dormant service. The app came straight from Google itself thanks to an URL supplied by an unnamed source, the site claims.
Details surrounding Google Drive have been mixed for a while, possibly due to leaked details stemming from beta testing. Originally we learned that the upcoming service would offer 1 GB, but it seemed miniscule compared to 2 GB of free storage from Dropbox, 5 GB from Box and 25 GB (5 GB of which can be synced to a local folder in Windows) via Microsoft's SkyDrive. Later reports bumped up the Google Drive capacity up to 2 GB, and then 5 GB.
As previously reported, other Google services already provide free storage including Gmail (8 GB), Google Music (up to 20,000 songs) and Google Docs (1 GB). It will be interesting to see how Google Drive will fit in with the other services.
If not, stick your cloud storage, since there is no point of storing things online if the people on your network (the internet) can't access it.
Google giving out 5GB storage space is perfectly adequate for the average user. Honestly, how much stuff do you need to store online? You don't use up storage space for music (other than being limited to 20k songs), you have 8GB for all your email and you get 1GB for documents.
Keep in mind that all of this is "free". If you still need more, then pay for it.