Google Shared Storage
Google has rolled out a paid storage service, called Google Shared Storage. The part of it I don't understand is why it's so expensive.
Here's the storage I'm using:
And here are the options for additional storage:
A 500 gig hard disk is around $100 these days, and that will only get cheaper. Google has the infrastructure to drop cheap hard drives into cheap hardware to expand the storage they have, so their cost for providing this service is probably closer to $80/year for 250gb (including drive replacement, mirroring, bandwidth). Nice markup for Google.
Also - once you're using 7gb of data, you jump from $20 to $75; it's not based on how much data they're actually storing.
I guess they're looking at Amazon as a pricing model - Amazon's S3 service charges $0.15 per gigabyte per month (plus bandwidth). That works out to pretty close to $500/year for 250gb of storage.