I recently set up a ProTools studio. The Digidesign documentation is very clear that ProTools sessions should not be saved to the same disk that hosts the ProTools application. So I used this opportunity to go out and buy some new external Firewire 400/800 hard disk drives. I tested the One Touch Maxtor One Touch III Turbo Edition 1TB drives, the standard LaCie Big Disk Extreme 500 GB drives and the G-Technology 250 GB G-Drive.
I ended up selecting the G-Drive; eight 250 Megabyte G-Drives to be exact. The LaCie's fan was simply too loud for use in the small space I had dedicated to the ProTools studio. Likewise, the Maxtor fan noise was very loud. Additionally, the Maxtor didn't seem to plug and play well with the MacBookPro.
So this review is all about the G-Drive.
CONNECTIONS
The G-Drive only ships with a Firewire 800 cable. That seems odd to me since the drive is eqiupped with both Firewire 400 and 800. Fortunately, I had some 400 speed cables laying around so it didn't slow me down. I hooked up the drives, turned them on (switch on the back) and they spun up in less than five seconds. The MacBookPro instantly recognized them. No software installation was necessary since these drives are pre-formatted for Macs. The Apple Disk Utility was able to mount and eject the G-Drives with no problem.
Once installed, the first thing I noticed was that the G-Drives certainly exhibited less noise than any other drive I have used. That doesn't mean they're silent. While they employ a fanless-design, there is still noise coming from the drive. You can hear it spinning. If I position the drives in the right place, they don't noticably impact my recordings.
The G-Drives stack well and their form factor takes up much less room than the LaCie drives, and a bit less room than the Maxtor drives. This may not be important to you but since I am working in a small space it was important to me.
I also want to mention that these aluminum enclosures are sturdy and attractive. Their design also compliments the Macintosh environment. While I haven't tested it, the G-Drive manual says these drives work equally well on a PC or a Mac.
OPERATION
Since my MacBookPro doesn't have a Firewire 800 port, I used Firewire 400 for all tests. I don't have any super fancy testing equipment, but I think my test results are accurate. Using the Firewire 400 cable I got 37 MB/sec transfer rates. The company claims "up to" 38 MB/sec so my tests can't be far off. I assume the Firewire 800 cable would speed that up significantly. G-tech says the Firewire 800 transfer rates can reach 61 MB/sec. The Hitachi 7200 RPM drive offers an eight MB cache and is perfectly optimized for recording audio or video.
I ran several tests putting audio to the drive via the Finder and via ProTools and it never missed a beat, no pun intended. Copy operations were smooth and reliable.
There is some noise as the disk writes, perhaps a bit more than I'd like, but it's not so loud as to be a real problem. Running the two test disks for 72 hours straight without any down time, there were no crashes or glitches of any kind.
CONCLUSION
The G-Drive is fast, reliable, sturdy and ready to do duty in any studio. It's only negatives are very minor. The lack of a Firewire 400 cable in the box is an oversight and the price is slightly higher than similar products.
The G-Drive comes in both smaller and larger configurations. It also ships with a generous two-year warranty and sells for $239.95 at the Apple Store.
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