Sept 26

Review: GTech G-RAID 500 and G-DRIVE-mini by:  mike

09/26/2006 06:45 PM

Event DV by Marc Franklin In testing, both the G-RAID and G-DRIVE-mini proved real troopers. The 500GB G-RAID enclosure performed flawlessly using both FireWire 400 and 800 connections, and I highly recommend it. The G-DRIVE-mini worked perfectly on direct FireWire 800 connections from G-Tech’s optional FireWire 800 card in my HP Xeon Workstation. All in all, based on its size, stamina, and overall value, I highly recommend the G-DRIVE-mini—especially if you travel. In the video business, we use a lot of storage, and next to tape, the medium we require most is hard drives. All of my workstations, except the one I bought in January, are stocked with all the hard drives I can fit in them. And the drives themselves also fill up pretty quickly. Like many videographers out there, I have some projects that are stored only on the drives and some that get stalled and have been on the drives for years. At some point, you can't just depend on internal storage, however well-augmented; you must resort to external drives. These come in two flavors, FireWire/IEEE 1394 and USB 2.0, and between the two, I prefer the FireWire drives. If you compare the maximum data transfer rates of the two technologies—400 Megabits per second (Mbps) for FireWire 400 drives versus 480Mbps for USB 2.0—you might conclude that USB is better. It's not. USB cannot sustain the 480Mbps transfer rate, and the variations in transfer speed can cause irregular performance. FireWire, by contrast, sustains its 400Mbps transfer rate reliably. read more...


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