Customer Reviews

G-Tech G-Drive Q Hard Drive - 1 TB - Firewire / Firewire 800 / Hi-speed USB / ESATA (91300601) Category: External Hard Drives

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(8)

 

 

1tb G-drive stopped working after four months of very light use of weekly time machine backups (freezing during +5 gig data transfers with mac's time machine, ummounting randomly). Sent it back to g-tech; got it back after a month. After another month of working well with time machine, the drive started freezing and unmounting again. I've had a 250g g-drive for six years and that one keeps working great. And I really liked this 1tb drive when it worked; hook up with the mac is effortless, data transfer with firewire 800 is fast. But given how prone it is to becoming a sexy looking aluminum brick, I can no longer recommend this 1tb g-drive; I'll be shopping for another brand next time.

A few months ago, I purchased this G-Tech 1TB external hard drive and it is simply incredible. I just had 2 western digital's die within a month again and was just tired of having to replace every year or so. Before purchasing another external drive, I went to the apple store in NYC and they couldn't rave enough about G-Tech. It is a solid drive and built like a tank. If you are very hard on everything like myself, G-Tech is the way to go. Yes, it does cost more than most other drives, but they will last. A majority of my industry friends only use G-Tech and swear by them. Their drives get knocked around constantly and they have never had a problem with them. I wish their price would be cheaper, but they are not. I have absolutely no regrets with my purchase and will now only purchase G-Tech for my external hard drives.

P.S. If you are into technology eye-candy, these drives are beautiful. That is not the reason why I bought one, but it certainly doesn't hurt.

Having the drive in an area where I work quite a bit I was very concerned with fan noise. The promotion on this drive emphasized its quietness and it is as quite as one could hope. I have it connected to an iMac and utilize Time Machine. When the scheduled back-up occurs, you can hear a slight amount of light drive noise as it spins up but otherwise, nothing. Well built case too.

This drive has had an easy life in my home. However, it began to fail to mount after a few months. I paid to ship it back to G-Tech for repair, and all seemed fine when I got it back. A month later when I went to use it again, it failed to mount AGAIN. I called G-Tech, and they said it was repaired with a faulty part (widespread problem). They said they'd send me an email to get it repaired again. I never got the email, and I haven't been able to get this resolved.

I paid $350 for this drive just over a year ago for reliability. It has been anything but reliable. Even if I do get it repaired again, I will never be able to trust it.

I too have have had this drive fail twice within 1 year. This drive definitely cannot be trusted with your precious data. It crashes without warning and if you have not backed up your data to another drive, you are out of luck. G-Tech's support option of data recovery is also unreliable. I elected for this option the first time my drive crashed, 6 months after purchase, and they were unable to recover any data whatsoever. I would have lost over 800GB worth of data (luckily I saved it to another drive as well). When I received my replacement drive, I was hesitant about using it for the first few months, but finally I began using it again. Within 2 months of regular use, it crashed again. Terrible. Do not use this drive if you value your data. It is not a good drive for professionals in the music and film industries as advertised.

I have been using G-Drives for years, and they have never failed. They are made by people who know that reliability is the most important thing in an external drive - not price. So you might save 50 bucks with a cheaper drive, but that's no consolation when it fails.

Get a G-Drive and don't worry about it.

BTW, they are silent, too - I keep them on my desktop without any noise issues. These are wonderful drives. Buy it and forget it.

I'm using the G-Drive 1-Tb via Firewire 800, connected to a refuses-to-die Powerbook G4-17 133Mhz. It was no work to set up, though I did run Disk Utility and split it into 2 partitions. I've used it to capture video, and am now copying all my client work to it to free up the internal drive.

This drive is absolutely ideal for Macintosh use. Probably PC use is fine, too.

It's virtually silent in operation, and the case is a work of art. I have 3 LaCie Big Disk 500Mb drives, which are fine, and some other similar drives from Other World, which are even better, but the G-Tech is on another level altogether, like fine hi-fi components. The heat sink is just over the top cool.

Still, I've only used it for a week!

The price here on Amazon is much better than I paid for it at the local Apple store, too. I needed it right away otherwise I'd have ordered it here.

I received the drive yesterday afternoon. I have several G-drives 500mb. I bought this drive for the extra space.

I started copying 165 mb of data from the Mac to the new G-Drive. It took over 4 hours. In contrast, it took 20 minutes on the older 500 mb G Drives.

I called G-Technology. First, they had me reboot and power off the drive. I restarted the copy and it started fast and within 2 minutes in slowed to a crawl...another 4 hours.

I called them again this morning and they said that they had been experiencing that problem with the version before this, but not the Gen4, which is what this one is.

I have been a big fan of G-Drive, but it seems as though they have gone down. I noted several complaints online and a person on Creative Cow said he experienced the same problem.

Yesterday this disk died. Everytime I plugged in the power brick into the disk drive, the power light on the power brick would die. At first I thought it was the cheap power brick that was shipped with the drive. Nope.

Since the data was far more valuable than the disk drive (and I was afraid that I would lose my data if I sent the drive in for repair), I decided to void the warranty and find out what went wrong with my disk drive. I traced it to the Hitachi hard drive that is inside the enclosure. When I looked at the 12V supply current, it pinged at 3A (the current limit on my power supply) or about 4X what it should have been.

The disk drive is a Hitachi HDT721010SLA360 (One of Hitachi's Deskstar 7K1000.B drives.) Hitachi places this under their "desktop" category. Hitachi also makes a series of enterprise class disk drives (with superior reliability). Considering how expensive this product was, it should have had a enterprise class hard drive in it.

If you are looking for a backup system, Apple's Time machine does advertise that it uses an enterprise class hard drive.

No more G-Tech for me.

I bought this 1TB drive and it failed right out of the box.

I sent it back, and it failed again within 6 months.

I am a professional photographer, I take great care of my equipment, and this drive never left my office. There is no reason for this drive to have been so unreliable.

I have purchased many products from G-Tech, and no longer trust the brand.

I wonder if their quality went down hill after Hitachi purchased the company?