G-Technology G-RAID with Thunderbolt Hard Drive Review

Videomaker by Adam Vesely

The G-RAID is a solid hard drive that can speed up your workflow and keep it simple at the same time.

When Intel's Thunderbolt technology first started shipping on Apple's flagship desktops and notebooks, video professionals were anxious to start using storage devices that used the lightning-fast connection, which at 10 gigabits per second, is twice as fast as USB 3.0. It's been a long time coming, but Thunderbolt products are finally spreading into the market, and one of the highlights is the G-RAID with Thunderbolt storage device by G-Technology. This storage system gives video professionals an affordable, yet very capable RAID storage system that is fast and simple to use right out of the box.

Speaking of the box, inside you will find the G-RAID enclosure, a power adapter, and a brief Quick Start Install Guide. No software is included as all the necessary drivers are included with Mac OS X.

When looking at the G-RAID enclosure, it becomes very apparent that the design was heavily influenced by Apple's own design practices. The G-RAID device itself is beautifully assembled out of solid aluminum, weighs about five pounds, and is about double the size of a standard 3.5-inch external hard drive enclosure. The G-Technology logo is prominently displayed on the front of the drive and glows brightly while the drive is powered. The back of the G-RAID provides a power switch, a port for the external power supply, and two Thunderbolt ports for connecting to your computer and daisy chaining additional Thunderbolt devices, like more hard drives or an extra monitor. The G-RAID with Thunderbolt is available in three storage sizes: 4TB and 8TB (our review model), and both models use the same enclosure. It is made with a RAID 0 configuration of the two drives inside the enclosure. While the RAID 0 configuration allows for faster read/write speeds, it also creates a data security risk in that if one of the two hard drives fail, you will lose all the data that was stored across both drives. For this reason, we would go for a second unit for backup purposes, or use other hard drives to back up important data. read more...