Hitachi G-RAID With Thunderbolt Review (8TB)

Storage Review.com by Kevin OBrien

Hitachi's G-Technology line of external hard drives has long been a favorite for creative professionals and others who generally need some combination of reliability, performance, capacity and redundancy. While Hitachi has several products in the G-Tech line that specialize in one or more of those qualities, their latest effort is an external storage generalist that can just about do it all. The G-RAID with Thunderbolt offers up to 4TB of capacity over two mirrored drives, or 8TB if configured for maximum throughput in RAID0 over Thunderbolt, while providing legendary reliability from Hitachi's latest Deskstar 7K4000 hard drives.

While the 4TB in RAID0 or 8TB spanned max capacity is great, the real highlight of course is the Thunderbolt interface, this is the first time Hitachi has used Thunderbolt in their G-Tech line. While Hitachi has never shied away from experimenting with new interfaces before, with Apple and Intel backing, Thunderbolt is here to stay for some time. And why not, Mac users have long deserved an interface that can deliver faster throughput than FireWire, in this case the G-RAID is capable of delivering over 300 MB/s read and write performance which is pretty impressive over a 4TB volume.

Hitachi's G-Technology G-RAID with Thunderbolt family is currently available through Apple. They come in 4TB, 6TB and 8TB capacities with suggested pricing of $699.99, $849.99 and $999.99 respectively. Like most Thunderbolt solutions, Thunderbolt cables must be purchased seperately. G-RAID products carry a three year warranty and free technical support by reps experienced with content creation applications. read more...

Note: G-Tech G-RAID Thunderbolt drives are not yet available from Videoguys. We hope to get our first shipments the end of June. We are going to begin taking back orders on or about June 1st.