Google Merges Drive, Google+ Photos and Gmail Cloud Storage

By Corentin Béchade, redactor, StorageNewsletter.com

In early October Google merged its
Drive cloud storage with what was Picasa storage at that time (now
Google + Photos) offering 5GB for the two services, a drawback
considering that Drive and Picasa storage added up were logically
offering 6GB. And just before Google I/O, the company announced in a
blog that they again modified their storage offer, merging Gmail
storage with Drive.

The 10GB of free Gmail storage will be
soon (if not already for some users) merge with the 5GB of Drive
capacity (which includes Google + Photos storage). Offering this time
a real merger with a solid 15GB of free storage for the two services
(making it one of the larger free cloud storage out there, better
than the 2GB of Dropbox space or the 7GB of Skydrive)

The Google Apps user will see a similar
move in their account, giving them 30GB of unified cloud storage
(25GB of Gmail and 5GB of Drive storage)

The Drive page has also been updated
with a pie chart breaking down how much storage is used by every app.

But it’s not entirely good news. With
this update, Google got rid of the cheapest storage plan. The 25GB
plan for $2.49 is now gone and the prices starts at $4.99 for 100GB
(still half the price of a similar Dropbox plan). However the people
who subscribed to a 25GB plan can keep it until they decide to move
to another level, the 25GB plan and the recent merged offer therefore
40GB of storage still at $2.49.

The other downside is the disappearance
of the 25GB Gmail bonus, offered for every paid plans. Because the
service is now merged with Drive, its capacity is evolving according
to the plan you choose.

These updates are both good and bad news
for users. On the one hand free, users have more flexibility to use
the three storage services as they want, and considering that photos
larger than 2048px use Drive storage instead of the unlimited Google
+ Photos storage, 15GB is an appreciable minimum. But 100GB for $4.99
is high price for people using cloud storage in lightweight way.

The update is rolling out and will take
a couple of weeks to hit all the accounts.