7.92 times cheaper, to be exact, if my calculations are right. According to this page, you can buy 1TB of storage for $256/year. According to this calculator, 1TB (1024 GB) of S3 storage costs $169 per month. A simple math tells us that $169 * 12 / 256 is about 8 and that’s how much cheaper Google’s storage is compared to S3.

I know it’s not exactly the same service, but the difference in cost is simply astonishing.

Is Amazon overcharging? Is Google 8 times more efficient than Amazon? Or is Google willing to loose its shirt in short term but set up a stage for the world of cheap, interchangeable, Chrome OS-running laptops without local storage, whose users mostly use Google’s on-line apps.

I don’t really care why – at $256/year for a terabyte of cloud storage it starts to look like an interesting alternative to drobo.