Google: Buy a Chromebook, Get 1TB Drive Storage Free for Two Years

With Chromebook sales expected to triple to 14.2 million units worldwide by 2017, or 5 percent of all PCs sold according to researcher Gartner’s figures, interest in the sub-$300 segment, while still largely confined to the education market, is extending outward to consumers with basic computing needs.

Chromebooks usually ship with limited storage–with Google (GOOG) typically adding 100GB of free cloud storage for two years on Google Drive. But, in a new promotion, the vendor is offering Chromebook buyers 1TB of free Drive storage, normally priced at $10 a month, for two years on models purchased through December 31, 2014.

Google’s offer, while nice, isn’t so fantastic, however, as to exclude all its competition. Hewlett-Packard‘s (HPQ) Stream 11, which runs full Windows 8.1, includes Bing and is priced at $199.99, comes with 1TB of OneDrive cloud storage and Office 365 Personal free for a year.

Most Chromebooks are priced in the $200 to $300 range, so the 1TB of storage, valued at about $240 value, costs less in some cases than the unit itself.

Alex Vogenthaler, Google group product manager, writing in a blog post on the promotion, said the vendor wants to make the point to users that “Chromebooks make day-to-day computing fast, simple and secure, whether you’re searching for a great pumpkin pie recipe or sharing a family photo from Google Drive.”

Just as a point of reference, 1TB of storage is enough to space to store some 100,000 images in one place, Vogenthaler wrote. “With that much free storage, you can use your Chromebook for work, play and pretty much everything else you’ll do this holiday season,” he said.

Buyers must redeem the offer by January 31, 2015.

According to Gartner, Samsung is the Chromebook kingpin at nearly 65 percent of the global market, followed by Acer with 21.4 percent of the segment.

Samsung, which recently pulled out of the laptop and Chromebook market in Europe, last month unwrapped a new, 11.6-inch entry-level $250 Chromebook running on an Intel (INTC) Celeron processor, in a departure from its own Exynos 5 Octa chipset that powers its pricier, existing 11.6-inch and 13-inch Chromebook 2 models launched last March.