Computers

G-RAID with Thunderbolt - the world’s highest capacity, RAID 0, Thunderbolt external HDD

G-RAID with Thunderbolt - the world’s highest capacity, RAID 0, Thunderbolt external HDD
G-RAID with Thunderbolt offers two Thunderbolt ports to enable daisy-chaining of up to six Thunderbolt peripherals
G-RAID with Thunderbolt offers two Thunderbolt ports to enable daisy-chaining of up to six Thunderbolt peripherals
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G-RAID with Thunderbolt front
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G-RAID with Thunderbolt front
G-RAID with Thunderbolt side angle
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G-RAID with Thunderbolt side angle
G-RAID with Thunderbolt front angle
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G-RAID with Thunderbolt front angle
G-RAID with Thunderbolt rear
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G-RAID with Thunderbolt rear
G-RAID with Thunderbolt underside
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G-RAID with Thunderbolt underside
G-RAID with Thunderbolt offers two Thunderbolt ports to enable daisy-chaining of up to six Thunderbolt peripherals
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G-RAID with Thunderbolt offers two Thunderbolt ports to enable daisy-chaining of up to six Thunderbolt peripherals
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Earlier this year, Western Digital (WD) acquired Hitachi Global Storage Technologies (HGST), and with it G-Technology. With HGST now operating as a wholly owned WD subsidiary, one of the first products hitting the shelves after the acquisition was the recently released G-RAID with Thunderbolt, which claims the title of the world’s highest capacity, RAID 0, Thunderbolt external storage drive.

The latest G-RAID drive is essentially identical to the G-RAID drive first shown at IBC 2011, but with the addition of Thunderbolt connectivity. The G-RAID with Thunderbolt drive is available in 4, 6 and 8 TB capacities, with two 7200 RPM Deskstar HDDs housed within the drive’s all-aluminum case, which features two Thunderbolt ports on the rear that allow for daisy chaining of up to six Thunderbolt-compatible peripherals.

Aimed primarily at audio and video professionals working on Macs, the G-RAID with Thunderbolt delivers sustained throughput of 280 MB/sec to handle multi-stream compressed HD workflows, including REDCODE, DVCPro HD, XDCAM HD and ProRes 422. The company boasts the drive can transfer a full-length, high-definition, internet-ready H.264 movie in less than a minute. And although it comes pre-formatted for Mac OS X systems, support for Windows systems is just a reformat away.

The G-RAID with Thunderbolt drive ranges in price from US$699.99 for the 4 TB model, $849.99 for the 6 TB model, and $999.99 for the 8 TB capacity unit.

Source: Hitachi Global Storage Technologies

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5 comments
5 comments
christopher
They *really* should not call these things "RAID" - there is nothing "Redundant" about them - worse - because it's a two-disk stripe, it's twice as likely to fail (causing the loss of all your data) than an ordinary drive...
The reviews report that the configurator does not facilitate RAID-1 usage, is USB only, and there's already negative reviews of victims with dead drives.
I've owned an 8-drive (8x2tb) RAID-5 array for a few years now - one drive fails on average every 3 months. A two-drive raid-0 unit has about the same odds of surviving as you do, if you played Russian roulette 4 times per year.
PimplyDykBallz
You have a hard drive fail EVERY 3 MO... WTF? What kind of garbage are you using? I not only have about 20 hard drives personally, some over 10 years old, and work fine, I also worked as a tech in the past and don't think I EVER saw a legitimate case of a hard drive that failed. Most hard drives have a 3 year warranty, and many now have a 5 year warranty. You're story is rediculous.
NatalieEGH
@Christopher, I have to agree with Pimply. In over 20 years and dozens of drives starting with 20MB drives back in the 80's, I have had only 3 drives fail.
Are you sure there is not another problem?
As someone who worked in the computer industry as a systems person for a major brokerage house, I can say your failure rate is very high. We ran, depending on data on the drives either raid 1 or raid 5 at the hardware level and raid 1 or raid 5 also at the software level. This meant we had to lose 4 drives to lose data. We had over 1000 drives. We had a hardware failure on average I would say once every 3-6 months. Assuming worse case, that would be 4 a year but that was from a bank of over 1000, so the average life expectancy was like 250 years/drive.
I do however agree that RAID 0 is not a RAID technology. It has however been an accepted term for at least 20 years. Anyone that knows disk drives and the industry will know that RAID zero is just a way to layout and read data faster, not a data protection scheme.
Sonya Jones
Make it with full RAID 1 operations and I will buy one. Otherwise, it is just another external hard drive with faster access. Fluff stuff.
Richard Oettinger
"RAID0" means "no RAID". RAID1 is implemented in a few ways by different manufacturers to improve the performance and resilience. The PROMISE Pegasus R6 has 12TB capacity in any RAID level - and now the 18TB version is available. A lot of storage in a small space!