Google slashes online storage prices as storage wars hot up

Online storage wars heated up last week with Google Drive cutting prices for people who wanted to store their videos, photos and documents online. However, according to most experts, even the biggest storage hoarders could find ways to avoid paying for space in the cloud.

On Thursday, the internet search company slashed prices for its monthly online storage plans to $1.99 from $4.99 for 100 gigabytes, and to $9.99 from $49.99 for 1 terabyte. According to Google 1 terabyte - the equivalent of 1,000 gigabytes - was enough storage to take a selfie twice a day for the next 200 years and still have room left over. Google offers 15 GB for free.

According to Avram Piltch, online editorial director of Laptop Mag, for Google and Microsoft, it was not really about the money. Microsoft's OneDrive offered 7GB for free and charged $25 a year for each 50GB, MarketWatch reported. Dropbox offered only 2GB for free and charged $9.99 a month for each 100GB, up to 500GB.

MarketWatch quoted Arun Taneja, founder of the Taneja Group, a Hopkinton, Mass-based consulting firm specialising in storage technology, as saying, Google was doing to big data companies what Amazon had done to bookstores.

He added, Google was trying to change the world of storage, adding that most people only needed around 5GB to 10GB, but according to Taneja the industry would look very different in just a few years.

The new lower prices were announced by Scott Johnston, director of product management for Drive, in a 13 March post on the Google Drive Blog.

''Today, thanks to a number of recent infrastructure improvements, we're able to make it more affordable for you to keep everything safe and easy to reach on any device, from anywhere,'' wrote Johnston.

According to Johnston, users who wanted more storage space could also get it, with rates starting at $99.99 for 10TB.

Google Drive was still offering 15GB of space to any users for free, as it has been doing previously, Johnson wrote.

Google added an ''activity stream'' to Google Drive to allow users to see whether files had been changed by others since the last time they accessed them.

 The alerts would serve to make it easier for workers who share files with others on Google Drive to learn about the latest changes and updates in their work group files.

Other Drive features were introduced in 2013, which included simpler file and folder renaming, sharing and organising, through a drop-down menu at the top of each shared folder.