Google is consolidating storage between Drive, Gmail and Google+, now offering users 15GB of free storage shared across all three platforms.
“Life gets a bit easier when your Google products work well together—whether that’s inserting a Drive file into an email or sharing a photo from Drive on Google+. As this experience becomes more seamless, separate storage doesn’t make as much sense anymore,” Clay Bavo, Google’s Director of Product Management said in a blog post announcing the change.
With the new combined storage space you are free to store what you want where you want. So you could in theory have 15GB of files stored in Gmail, but nothing stored anywhere else; or 5GB in Gmail, 9GB in Google Drive, and a few photos hanging out in Google+.
Previously you were restricted to 10GB of free storage in Gmail, and 5GB for Google+ and Google Drive. You were also unable to upgrade Gmail storage past 25GB. Monday's unified storage announcement removes that cap.
Google also updated the Google Drive storage page. The new page has a pie chart breaking down your own personal storage over each platform, and offers easy access for buying more data. Users can upgrade to 100GB of storage, for instance, for $4.99 per month.