I never understood how it’s possible in the first place. I buy hard drives for storing media, I’m fully aware of the costs (sure, Google may be getting a better deal for buying in bulk, but still, terabytes of storage don’t grow on trees).
I always assumed it had something to do with people paying for more space than they were using.
I think that in most cases, you’re right. But people who had unlimited plans usually bought them to test the limits. They made shared drives for other people to use etc etc, just to see when Google emails them and says “enough is enough”.
You’d be astounded at the discounts offered to the largest customers… Comcast is the largest customers for Cisco switches, they probably pay 20¢ on the dollar for a switch. For Google I cannot imagine it’s not a better deal than that for storage.