Google is no stranger to odd rumors about its company. However, one of the more exciting rumors over the last five years has been the Google GDrive, a computer hard drive that would exist solely in virtual space and would allow all the functionality of a standard hard drive. Some, including official Google representatives, have denied that this is a Google project. Others, however, say that it’s inevitable — and that, in many ways, it already exists.
If it does exist, it’s going under a different name: Google storage. Google Documents and Picasa currently allow users to upload and store up to a gigabyte of files. What makes this different today, however, is that they now allow you to upload any kind of file. This means that you can store anything you want.
A gigabyte, however, isn’t that much. While it can meet the needs of those bouncing files around, it certainly isn’t up to the standards of most modern hard drives. However, the cost of expanding this storage space isn’t all that high. At a quarter per gigabyte per year, the cost of getting sufficient storage may not be as challenging as you thought.
What Google storage doesn’t do that the mythical GDrive should, however, is run software off of the web-based platform. While many have said that this simply wouldn’t be possible with current software formatting, current technologies are beginning to bring that into question.
The cloud-based social media software explosion has shown us much of what can be done online. Applications, even complex ones using advanced graphics, can be accessed directly through a web browser. As such, it seems possible that a move toward a purely virtual hard drive would be plausible. Whether or not it will happen soon, what restriction it will have, and whether Google will be the first to do it, has yet to be seen.
