G-Drive Mobile Portable Hard Drive

The G-drive lets you store all data for a project in one place, and easily carry that between work and home editing stations. It’s great for downloading footage from media devices, and perfect for giving clients everything they need on a single small, convenient drive. The G-Drive is much easier to send through the mail than a large, desktop drive, if that’s something you need to do. You can even use it for cloning your system drive before upgrading your operating system, so that you can boot back into the old one if necessary.

Obviously, other drives are also capable of these things, but the G-Drive does stand out. For one thing, it’s made by G-Technology (who are now owned by Hitachi), of the most well-known and top-selling makers of drives in media circles. G-Tech has a very good reputation for reliability, and have been retailing drives to media content producers for many years. To back that up, the G-Drive has a 3-year warranty, which is much longer than average.

A unique feature of the G-Drive is that not only a USB port but also two fast FireWire 800 ports. You don’t find FireWire 800 on many portable drives these days, so the faster method for transferring large amounts of data will be appreciated by Mac users. There are a few portable drives that have one FireWire 800 port, but I haven’t seen any others with two. This is definitely a point in favor of the G-Drive, as it allows you to connect different drives through it. It’s certainly handy if you need to transfer data between drives and are running out of USB 2 or FireWire ports.

Yet another point in its favor is that the G-Drive come with pretty long cables (more than four feet for USB and over two feet for FireWire). This might not be the most important feature ever, but it certainly makes things more convenient.

G-Drive Mini

One more highlight is that the G-Drive looks really good next to a modern-day Mac. It has a similar brushed aluminum body as well as a glossy black top that matches the black borders and keyboards of modern Macs. Everything else being equal, it’s great to have a rugged, stylish piece of gear rather than a cheap plastic contraption.

There’s not much to say about hard drive performance, as it’s so dependent on what computer the drive’s connected to, how many drives share the same bus, how many files you’re copying and what size, etc. But it’s worth pointing out that the G-drive a 2.5″ Hitachi hard drive that spins at 5400 rpm, that has an 8 MB cache, and for a conventional hard drive has a respectable speed.

There are some features you might be looking for, though, that the G-Drive doesn’t provide. It doesn’t have fast eSATA ports, which in theory run at double the speed of FireWire 800. In reality you may never see those speeds because of bottlenecks, and in any case not many computers even have eSATA ports.

You might want to consider Solid-State Drives, which use fast memory chips, and not spinning drives. They’re very fast, and very rugged, but unfortunately also very expensive. They cost considerably more than the G-Drive, and have only half the capacity.

In short, if you’re needing to store a lot of data in a hassle-free, hand-held package, the G-Drive is a great option. It’s a bit more costly than some of its lower-level competitors, especially USB-only drives, but you not only get a 3-year warranty and two FireWire 800 ports, but also G-Tech’s well-established reliability. That’s definitely worth paying a few more dollars.

Seagate barracuda 7200.11 1.5 TB

Substance (RoHS) requirements. Comparing with other rival hard drives, it proved to perform better in many ways.

Specification of Seagate barracuda 7200.11 1.5 TB:

The 1.5TB Seagate barracuda drives comes with a SATA 3Gb/s NCQ interface with a cache memory of 32MB. It has a sustained data rate of 120 MB/s. The speed of the spindle is 7200rpm. It uses a soft sonic motor, which is efficient in producing low noise levels.

The range of noise produced is from 2.7 to 2.9bels in idle conditions and during seek situations it varies from 3.0 to 3.2bels. When it is in idle condition, it consumes only 8W of power which is very less when compared to any product in the market. 1.5TB is split into four platters with 375GB in each platter.

Performance of Seagate barracuda 7200.11 1.5 TB:

Being the first ever model with 1.5TB capacity there is a huge expectation regarding the performance of the drive. Barracuda family drives are capable of sustaining transfer rates up to 120MB/s. This speed enables the drives to enter the territory of VelociRaptor. Leading in both capacity and performance, it costs little less $100 making it affordable for all sorts of people. Operating noise level is very low since Seagate uses SoftSonic motor. As it consumes only 8W during idle condition, there are very less chances for the drive to get heat up, as it is enclosed. The drive performed comparatively well during the real-world file copy tests and sequential throughput drag races.

Advantages of Seagate barracuda 7200.11:

This drives evolved with many strengthened features that developed for more than 11 generation. 1.5TB barracuda drives are completely reliable in both performance and quality. Perpendicular Magnetic Recording technology is responsible for capacity boosting. It has some of the best in class environmental features and specification that makes it very special. Consistent read and write performance offered by Adaptive Fly Height technology. The drive calibrates automatically with the help of Clean Sweep. Mishandling damages are taken care of enhanced G-Force Protection. Seagate’s SoftSonic motor helps the drive to operate with ultra low noise.

In addition to these advantages, Perpendicular Magnetic Recording found to increase the dependability and capacity of storing data vertically and not horizontally. As mentioned above, this drive is eco-friendly to work with and it saves up to 43% of energy with no compromise in performance of the drive and the system. It also meets the standards of Restriction of Hazardous Substances, which takes care of limiting hazardous materials in recent electronic components.

Seagate offers 5 years warranty to this drive and the after sale service of Seagate is good. Though chances for the drive to get damages physically are very tough, Seagate offers a long period warranty for this drive. Seagate barracuda 7200.11 is highly recommended for high data storage applications, gaming applications, multimedia storage, etc.