G-Tech mobile Pro SSD: The Go-To Mobile Drive for Content Creators

By Chris Monlux with Videomaker Magazine

Portable storage and ruggedized devices are becoming more desired amongst photographers and video producers. With users using their social media to show high profile events or remote ares showing the beauty of nature, having a more rugged, portable, durable and especially smaller device is necessary. Shooters in the field are constantly moving and offloading data and must be able to rely on those devices. The industry has heard and so many companies have responded with new products and improvements made on others. The key with these products are to not only be tougher and more rugged but not sacrificing read and write speeds.

G-Technology has always been ahead of the industry with their devices. With products like the G-DRIVE ev ATC, G-Technology has kept this ruggedized sense of mind for some time now. But now seeing the rise of SSD's in the industry, G-Technology made it a priority to make their new SSD's not only faster than the competition but as durable as any drive on the market. The G-DRIVE mobile Pro SSD is the latest in this type of device that when all the factors are added up, provide the best value for the price and go beyond with the physical protection of the unit, which means your footage is safe and sound.

To verify the speed of the unit, we connected it to a 2017 iMac Pro via Thunderbolt 3. The drive was immediately recognized and was ready to use. To test its speed, we used both the AJA System Test Lite and Blackmagic Disk Speed Test. We saw a 2331 MB/s write speed and a 2535 MB/s read speed with AJA System Test Lite. With Blackmagic Disk Speed Test, we saw a 2295 MB/s write speed and a 2472 MB/s read speed. While we didn’t see the fastest speed advertised by G-Technology, the speeds we did experience were more than enough for most.

Outside of tests, we used the mobile Pro SSD to edit a project with multiple different data-rates, codecs and resolutions. Using a 15-inch 2016 MacBook Pro with Touch Bar, we edited a 14-minute video directly off of the drive. Our main a-roll was shot in 4K ProRes 444 and our main b-roll was 4K Canon RAW lite. We also mixed in some 4K CinemaDNG RAW b-roll as well. All of the data, including the Premiere Pro project, was stored on the drive. We edited all of the footage in its native codec. Reading and writing data to this drive offered no performance difference compared to editing off the internal drive of the computer....[continue reading]