Creative Cow by Helmut Kobler

I've used many portable hard drives over the years. I bought my first one -- a 12GB model -- to do DV editing on a PowerBook G3 while sitting at Starbucks. It did the job, although I could only edit about an hour of footage at a time, and the drive sometimes dropped frames during playback. A year later, I upgraded to a 30GB model -- that's more than 2 hours of DV video! -- and thought that was all the space I would ever need....until the next year, of course, when I upgraded again, and then again, and then again. Now, I'm using G-Technology's G-Drive Mobile ($149), and it's about as good a drive as I've ever used. It's small enough to stuff into any bag, it doesn't need AC power to run, and it stores 500GB of content, including dozens of hours of top-tier HD video.

As an editor, the G-Drive lets me keep all of a project's footage in one mobile place, easily taking the footage between home and work editing stations. Working as a cameraman, I've found the G-Drive handy for offloading footage from my P2 cards, and then handing clients one small, convenient drive with everything on it. If I have to send footage back through the mail, the G-Drive is also easier to pack up versus a bigger, desktop drive. I've also used the G-Drive Mobile to clone my Mac Pro's system drive before upgrading to Snow Leopard, so I could occasionally boot up my old operating system.


What's So Special?
Of course, the G-Drive isn't the only portable drive that can do these things. There seem to be dozens of options out there, but the G-Drive stands out for a few reasons.

For starters, it's made by G-Technology (now owned by Hitachi), which is one of the best-known and frequently purchased drive makers in media circles. G-Tech has been selling drives to content producers for years, and has a strong reputation for reliability. To back up that reputation, the G-Drive comes with a 3-year warranty, which is more than many drives I've come across lately (the average seems to be 2 years). read more...