As a person working on a web storage product, I'll tell you that's not a dirty little secret--it's our business.
Sound's very loosely like fractional banking.
What percent do you have to keep on hand per user in order to prevent maxing out the storage capacity? Or do you just let it max out and then add more storage?
Sure there are some users who will max out their accounts, but those will be averaged by those who hardly use any.