Customer Reviews

1000GB G Raid 2 1TB

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

This one terabyte drive is big enough to tackle the needs of most any personal computer user out there. The ratings all over the Web suggest better than average life span and few failures out of the box.

If you're into the metallic aluminum look of a lot of electronics today, this will fit right in with your decor. The bright white light on the front of the drive (dare I say beacon?) stays lit 100% of the time, and if the drive is reading/writing data, the light flashes like an white LED strobe light. Some will love it and some will put black tape over the supernova white lamp.

It has a cooling fan at the rear end and holes on front, back and sides for full airflow. The biggest negative is the noise factor. The thing whirrs constantly at high speed. If you have an older PC with a traditional cooling fan, you'll never notice the G-Raid drive over the PC noise. But if you have a newer model, super quiet PC, or an iMac (which is absolutely silent), you'll be looking for a distant spot to locate the whirring G-Raid. Luckily the drive comes with a long (about 4') cable that can run either 400 or 800 FireWire. USB 2.0 is also supported. -1 star for the noise factor.

I now own 4 of these hard drives. I use them for storing my video clips while using FCP. Video is the most demanding use of any hard drive and these drives have done an outstanding job. Also I do not find them to be that noisy, in fact they are quieter than most drives. I have been using these drives for about 2 years and plan to buy more.

It's not that loud. I never hear it unless it's copying large files or rendering large Photoshop or Final Cut files. And because of the design, it seems to stay cool. HOWEVER, my G Raid died just about 4 months after I bought it. It took with it several years of my artwork, and my iPhoto and iTunes libraries. Luckily, once I sent it in for repair, G-Tech recovered all that, fixed the drive and shipped it back to me within two weeks. If I'd had to pay a third party to recover the data, it would've cost me maybe $1000, so I'm glad G-Tech does it for free as part of the drive's standard warrantee coverage.

But as another reviewer said, I'm not trusting it as a solo backup anymore. Now I backup to this drive, my Time Capsule, and online via mozy.com ($5/month for unlimited space). Ironically, as I'm typing this, my OTHER external hard drive (a 4 year-old La Cie) seems to have died (I'm hearing the click of death & it dismounted from my desktop), so I'm planning on buying another G-tech drive for even more redundancy.

Bottom line, hard drives die ALL THE TIME (no matter what the brand and no matter what you paid for it) and sometimes data can't be recovered, so having *multiple* backups is essential.

I bought this product, but am going to return it. I didn't realize at the time that this is RAID 0, which means it has two 500GB drives in it and uses striping. The result is very good performance (two disk heads), but means that if either hard drive fails, you lose all your data. Given hard drives do fail, you just doubled your chance of a serious data loss. Use this drive for performance, but back up with time machine.

RAID 1 is mirrored for data redundancy. I would have kept it if it offered RAID 1 support as I want to put all my personal photos on a redundant hard-drive set up and not worry about losing them.

We're a professional video production company and this has been one great drive. No issues. Fast. Reliable. Zero latency.

Bottom line -these things do bite the dust. It is a great price and good storage, and when my GRAID2 failed, the company said they would send me a new one right away. But I will not trust it solo anymore - now I am going to have to buy another drive to back up my backup. At these prices it's probably still a good investment, but I wanted to warn the potential buyers that my first drive failed me and I lost 55 hrs of video (and hours of blood/sweat and tears over my video project) overnight.

Works fine. Not really much to say except it does what it needs to.

However, Mac users need to be advised of one thing: my model, out-of-the-box, was formatted as APM (PowerPC-compatible boot). If you want to use this to either boot an Intel Mac, or even see the drive via BootCamp 3.0 on Windows, then be sure to reformat it as GUID (Intel-compatible boot).

I had this issue and had to deal with the inconvenience of reformatting and reloading a nearly full drive, here. Again, FYI!

*** EDIT 10/16/11 ***

I've had this for two and a half years and it still goes strong. Hope I didn't just jinx it.)

So far, this has been an excellent hard drive. Excellent performance (and it's pretty too!). However -- I have the drive on a shelf on my desk, so it's pretty close to my face, and I find it to be a little loud. But, this drive is a beast and it probably needs a beastly fan to keep it cool. So, I only turn it on twice a day to back-up.

When this one fills-up; I will buy another one and sit it right on top of the first one.

There are cheaper drives. But how important is your data to you?

I should have listened to those who reported these drives failing quickly. While they work they are quite noisy. Mine failed after a few months. I would strongly suggest buying something else.

Seamless... I was concerned about the noise factor after reading some of the reviews, but honestly, this drive is quieter that all of my other drives... a perfect combination with Time Machine... sweet!