Gear & Apps
New Line of Rugged G-Drives | Built To Take A Beating
Walking around the expo floor here at WPPI, storage products can easily be glanced over with all the presenters drawing crowds and new consumer electronic products being showcased around every corner. While hard drives and RAID systems most likely aren’t at the forefront of everyone’s agenda, they were for me. I have personally been interested in seeing what the storage solution company G-Technology has to offer. With a new line of light and extremely durable hard drives just recently announced, I was very interested in stopping by their booth to talk to their reps.
Having a professional quality storage setup is a must if you want to avoid the inevitable hard drive crash and losing your files and images forever and ever into the great abyss of nothingness. Reliable storage and backup solutions aren’t cheap, but at the same time, they fall under the category of you get what you pay for. G-Technology is one of the best in the business and offer a number of different versatile options for photographers as far as storage goes.
[REWIND: Digital Storage & Back-up Overview]
The new G-Technology EV Series of hard drives are quite impressive in person. The drives themselves, the G-Drive ev RaWs, are very sleek looking as well as being extremely light. The EV all-terrain cases have been designed to handle all sorts of punishment. They are designed to handle drops as well as having the ability to float with its watertight compartment. There is also a rugged bumper that is available for the ev RaW drives that can withstand a 1.5m drop and are pretty easy to pop on and off as needed.
The G-Drives themselves come with up to 1TB of storage, transfer rates of 136MB/s, USB 3.0, and a very impressive 3 year warranty. They also come with a SATA interface allowing them to be used with the G-DOCK which is pointed out in the video below. The price of the G-Drive and which comes with the removable bumper is $129.95 for the 1TB and $99.95 for the 500GB. The G-Drive ev ATC is the All-Terrain solution that comes with the new durable and air-tight case and a tethered thunderbolt cable. The actual size of the case itself is 6.46”x 4.25”x 1.20” and it will run you $229.95 for the 1TB drive.
I got the chance to talk with the G-Technology Sr. Director of Marketing Diana Cartwright who was a pleasure to talk to, take a look.
Thanks to B&H Photo for sponsoring our coverage of WPPI 2015!
how about this for rugged –
http://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/1112685-REG/samsung_mu_ps1t0b_am_1tb_portable_ssd_t1.html
Quality stuff from G-tech, thanks for sharing
I really love the G-Drive aesthetic, but they come off as expensive, and there are other options at better price points… IMHO
Sounds like the same exact thing that many folks say about Apple computers, but they still seem to sell quite well. ;-)
G-Drive doesn’t use Seagate, which is a better peace of mind, though it cost a bit more.
Nice product… thanks
It is not clear if it is an SSD drive or a standard one. Anyway, the price is very good…
for that price you can probably assume a regular drive – 129.00
I think the SSD prices for a 1tb start around 389.00 ish – if they had one it’d be most likely 550.00 in the case it’s in…
Built to take beating ? I mean, if it ain’t an SSD inside, I do not encourage you to beat it! The box itself might be as durable as a tank and take the beating from hell, but a normal hard drive…hmmmm .. that’s one fragile son of a gun! The distance between the heads and the plates is measured in microns and even the slightest hit can damage the HDD. With the SSD it’s another thing, it can take some beating because it has no rotating parts, reading heads and stuff like that.
I wish you could have the option of a larger size like a 2TB.
Me too…1TB is too small these days, especially when shooting with a D810 or similarly high-MP camera.
I would think these portables are only meant for shoot assignments and projects, then offloaded to a server/RAID large capacity drives. I wouldn’t think of using this as a main holding storage unit(s)
If you want to go off the deep end – literally, then encase a 1TB SSD into a similar watertight case…
cost around $450.00 (drive and case), and if the case is truly shockproof, that helps, but typical SSD’s can withstand up to 25 times more shock than regular HDDs, and the performance gain is just insane – limited to the throughput to your interface (Thunderbolt, USB 3, or eSata; respective to performance…) yet we all know SSD’s rock…
So, if you get rough with your external drives and they break often – think SSD, a natural (no moving parts) anti-shock proof (just about) and really can withstand a beating…
:)
This is a great way to protect your data! Thanks for sharing!