G-RAID with Thunderbolt Drive Review

Audioholics by Andrew Gash

Not only am I the face of the Audioholics product review videos, I also have the job of editing them together. That’s sort of my niche: editing video. And now that everything shoots in HD and the smallest video file can take up over a gig—sorry, gigabyte—hard drive space is a commodity that is both increasingly cheap yet even more increasingly in demand. I recently switched away from a Mac Pro tower to a faster iMac, but with that came a loss of four hard drive slots. I wanted (needed, really) an external drive solution that could replace the terabytes of internal storage I was using. But I also needed a drive (or drives) that didn’t compromise speed. Basically, I wanted a Thunderbolt drive. G|RAID's solution intrigued me, so I decided to try it out.

Their G-RAID with Thunderbolt drive comes in two configurations with the only difference being the drive capacity (4TB or 8TB split across two 7200-rpm Hitachi drives). I reviewed the 8TB, which G-Tech touts can hold up to 8.4 hours of HDV 1080i footage, 1.7 hours of DVCPRO HD video, or 1 hour of Apple’s ProRes422 HQ per 100GB. As most companies do, G-Tech also lists the amount of photos and MP3s it can hold, and while everyone’s megapixel and encoding rates will be different, let’s just say it’s a lot.

The enclosure is all-aluminum and very simple, yet attractive, and it blends into the current Apple brushed aluminum ecosystem well. It’s got a Thunderbolt badge on the front which distinguishes it from G-Tech’s other G|RAID drives. On the back is a fan that cools the unit, a power button (I miss the hard toggle switch on other models) and two (count 'em) Thunderbolt ports. If you’re looking to use this drive with a computer without thunderbolt, you’re out of luck. That’s probably the only drawback of this unit except for the fact that it doesn’t come with a thunderbolt cable. With a retail price of $999, I expected not to have to drive to my nearest Apple store just to shell out another $49 for a cable. Then I researched what goes into making a thunderbolt cable and found I understood the exclusion a little bit more seeing as they’re not your dime-a-dozen USBs. Still, for a grand, please find a cable and throw it in the box. read more...