So Google is said to be about ready to launch their Google Drive, or “GDrive” service. If you haven’t heard, this is basically an internet hard drive for the user. As in, rather than keeping that extra gigabyte of stuff you never use but haven’t bothered deleting yet, you can junk up Google’s storage space instead of your own.
On the one hand, you have to admit that that’s pretty cool. Remember when a few hundred megabytes was more than enough storage space? Yeah, not so much these days. We live in an era where it takes a 120 GB hard drive just to keep your Xbox save files, so you can’t help but be a little excited about the prospect of unlimited hard drive space.
And just imagine, your system crashes, so instead of sticking your head in the oven, you just plug in some parts from that three year old PC in the closet, and all your files are still available to you through your GDrive.
On the other hand, a number of critics are concerned about the whole Big Brother angle here. Do you really want to store all your data online somewhere? Google has generally proven to be a trustworthy company, but there’s no such thing as an unhackable website. If there were, spell check wouldn’t be telling me that “unhackable” is not a real word.
If the plan goes through (Google’s being kind of hush-hush about it for the time being), this is going to be a big step in the shift towards “cloud computing”, wherein the storage and processing of data is actually done thousands of miles away, turning the home computer into little more than a remote control.
Regardless of whether you want Google holding private data, you’ve got to admit that that’s pretty exciting. The idea is that the home computer you buy ten years from now would basically be just a portal you use to access high-end processors across the world. If you’ve got an imagination, you’re already considering the possibilities. Imagine having access to the computers at Pixar or Lucas Film from the comfort of your bargain bin laptop… Okay, we’re not quite there yet, GDrive is just a drive, but it’s a big step in an exciting direction.
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This is great news! – What would be useful is some way of “mapping” it as a network drive. This way, you could literally just use it as a local hard drive.