If you thought Google was content on keeping to its core business of search, you’re going to get a shock – it’s now on the verge of breaking into the world of online storage.

The global leader of search engines is about to launch Gdrive, a free service allowing users to store the entire contents of their hard drives on the internet.

Media reports are hailing the introduction of Gdrive as the potential death of the PC, with ‘cloud computing’ the way of the future. The service will potentially be launched next year.

Gdrive’s introduction would mean any device with an internet connection could perform the tasks of a PC and would rival Microsoft’s Sky Drive that offers 25GB of free storage but is limited to 500MB per file.

The service is likely to be tied into its Gmail email offering, which allows users to store documents and images.

It could also be powerful enough to boot up programs with the help of a possible Google operating system.

There are concerns, however, among privacy campaigners over whether it is a good idea to allow such a quantity of commercial and private data to be available online.

Google is yet to comment on the Gdrive launch news.