G-Technology G-SPEED eS 8TB RAID with eSATA PCIe Host Adapter, RAID 0, 1, 5, 10, JBOD

2010-12-15T19:00:00

This is a great little RAID box. I interned with an NFL team that uses these guys. When the internship was over I returned to working for a production house I worked for previously. When we needed a new computer I opted for one of these instead of an internal RAID-5 or a Drobo. Since it's an external RAID it external it offers more flexibility than the internal ones. Having the OS on an internal RAID seems a bit clunker. Compared against the Drobo products, I believe this drive to be a better long-term approach. The Drobo units rely on their proprietary BeyondRAID technology. It's great - but its effectiveness breaks down as you store more and more data on the drive. When another one of our editors (with an internal Apple RAID-5) needed more space we returned to this product as it meets our needs, and it offers us redundancy against a RAID controller failure. The G-Speed eS ships in a RAID-0 for Mac. Setup on a MacPro is pretty simple, drop the eSATA port into an open slot on your computer, connect the power and eSATA cable, and it shows up when you boot the machine. It should take under a half hour to do everything. As 4 drives in one box (despite the active cooling) is a heat trap I suggest rebuilding the array to be a RAID-5 immediately. The manual (PDF on included disc) explains the process, which takes under 10 minutes to initiate. On this 4x2tb model it takes about 30 hours to reconfigure the drive to be a RAID-5, but after that you have tolerance for a single drive failure. I've been happy with every G-Tech (Hitachi-owned) drive I've used. They do what they're supposed to do, and they don't nag you with built-in backup software. After 6 months using 5 G-Speed eS boxes I strongly recommend them to anyone looking for several terabytes of storage.

JEFF M.