Customer Reviews

G-Technology G-DRIVE 1TB External Hard Drive w/ eSATA, USB 2.0, Firewire 400, Firewire 800 Interfaces 0G00199

5 star:		(64)
4 star:		(13)
3 star:		(6)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(33)

 

 

With my 300GB drive too small I went shopping for a new 1 TB drive (the first time in 3 years). Over the years, I've bought several Seagate/Lacie externals and Seagate/IBM (now Hitachi) internal drives. Some drives are certainly faster and quieter than others; some are downright annoying but you just can't tell from the specs alone which I why I rely on reviews.

To my dismay, I discovered through my research that every brand/model of drive has received poor reviews. There wasn't a clear choice to make. It would seem that computer reliability has increased to the level that the hard drive is the weak link in the system now. Since my existing external was a Seagate 300GB firewire, I went with a 1TB FreeAgent from Seagate. Boy was that a huge mistake. Users are very unhappy with that product and so was I: it appears that Seagate doesn't build their firewire drives for mac compatibility anymore. If you need firewire, avoid Seagate.

Having a reliable backup drive is more important than ever so I crossed my fingers and went with G-Tech based on its feature set and my previous positive experience with Hitachi drive mechanisms (they own G-Tech).

Enclosure Pros:

- eSATA/FW800/FW400/USB2

- every kind of cable included (a rarity now and a great value for the money)

- large on/off button

- sturdy metal case

- no annoying fan

- the drive mounts to sled with a heat-sink that protrudes from bottom of case for improved cooling

- hundreds of ventilation holes at front and sides of case

- combo power/activity light

- attractive case

Mechanism Pros:

- very quiet drive

- fast 69MB/s read, 58 MB/s write (over FW800 w/ MacBook Pro 2007) - haven't tested eSATA yet

- HFS+ formatted for instant use on Macs

Cons:

- none to date

Some people have complained that the enclosure is larger than the typical upright design (5" x 9 1/4" x 1 3/4"). There are easily larger units to be found out there so I guess the complaint comes down to the fact that the drive is designed to sit horizontally on the table. I've seen the Seagate FreeAgent drives with their flimsy stands forcing you to lay the drive down on the desktop. The WD case seems to have the best design for vertical orientation but I don't think that's important as other features.

I'm very happy with the enclosure (G-Tech: please don't change a thing!). My advice to those that take issue with the size, is to get a G-Tech mini or other tiny USB2 based 2.5" drive. All 3.5" based externals tend to take up desk space one way or another.

Summary:

After buying this unit, I may never buy a drive in a plastic enclosure again. This is a solidly made unit compared to the flimsy offerings on the store shelves today.

This product is a winner: fast, quiet, reliable and cleverly designed. An excellent value.

PS. Why companies like WD even conceive of stuffing two already hot drives into the same raid enclosure with no fan is beyond me. G-Tech has a much better design for a raid enclosure.

Purchased from Amazon, and have owned MANY external drives. These drives are first rate, from the construction, to the design, to the details, including hidden heat sink under drive. They run warm (not hot), and they behave very well with my Mac Pro. They quickly go to sleep when not in use, and they wake up when the computer calls for them. This is an issue with many external drives. These, on the other hand, are perfectly behaved, very quiet, and fast. I am using them on Firewire 800 for time machine and SuperDuper Clone backups, and they are flawless. SuperDuper Clone can boot system and is a perfect substitute, just as advertised. I have used this method for years, but some of the external drives have let me down. Not these. I have finally finished my long and expensive search for the right external drive. Should have started here in the beginning. Almost forgot... Amazon was the vendor. Nothing needs to be added to that except... Perfect. I will add more as I can afford, to use as external SATA using the 5th and 6th SATA ports on my Mac Motherboard. Been less successful with this with other drives, but I feel good about these drives. One thing, of course... Put a piece of black tape (I used a square piece of black duct tape) on face of white light on drive. It makes the light tolerable. Otherwise it is like headlights from an oncoming car. But the black tape looks factory, and you can still see the light. You'll understand when you do this.

I can't recommend this drive. Despite the beautiful case design and build quality, the HD controller has failed and makes it impossible to work on. My Adobe apps crash, the computer freezes, and the drive becomes unresponsive. I'm working to have it replaced by G-Tech. At least their customer service is answering their email, and I'm hopeful the "NEW" design will be better.

For now, I Recommend buying another brand.

UPDATE:

They (finally) sent me a new drive enclosure with my 'old' hard drive installed into it. The new one's working well, although for some reason Retrospect finds it incompatible, as it's always 'busy' and inaccessible. But I've been using it as a boot-drive on a Powerbook and it's been fine.

So the controller problem, which they've been aware of, may be a past issue. Still, I'm done with G-Tech for now. I'm going back to Other World Computing (MacSales) for external drives at reasonable prices.

One word of advice if you DO have a problem: The email support guy is okay but doesn't follow up. I waited for weeks after the drive was promised by email, then phoned them. They person I spoke with saw how long I'd been waiting and got me a NEW device promptly, so CALL them after you've sent in the drive for service.

I bought the 1.5TB G-Drive Q a year ago. The hard drive was always noisy and was slow to respond when idle. But I had nothing to compare it to. Well, the hard drive failed recently and all data on it is probably lost. Check this [...] before trusting one of these drives too much. Well, I had already purchased this 2TB G-Drive and was waiting for it to arrive when the other one failed. (If it had only help up for another week I would have copied all the data to the new drive.) The new drive does seem better; it's nearly silent, can't hear it at all sitting under the desk, where as, the other one was always very audible whenever it was getting into motion. The new drive has a much more compact power supply with a standard DC connector.

Update: Ops, I posted an external link, I see that is not allowed. It was to the G-Tech support forum. Well, I must add to this review that G-Tech really took care of me in the end. It took a little effort to get a response from them and to get them to understand I needed the data recovered or returned "and" (not "or") the drive repaired. They recovered the data and sent me a brand new 2TB G-Drive, so I have no complaints. I'd say they are dedicated to customer satisfaction even if they don't always get it right the first time.

I purchased my drive after consulting with a few sales people at the local Apple Store. They recommended G Technology over Western Digital or LaCie. Just a few days after I started using it, I noticed bizarre behavior. Transfers would slow down about midway through a backup. Then, they just stopped doing anything at all, and my computer would freeze up until I disconnected the drive.

I contacted G Technologies customer support because the drive was under warranty. I received an email telling me that there was a problem with my drive. They told me I would receive an RMA to return the drive for service. Boy, was I surprised when the RMA came through. It had a dozen instructions on how to pack the drive to send to them for service. One of the instructions made it clear that the packaging the drive came with was insufficient for shipping. It also made it clear that proper packing was my responsibility and my sole cost. There was no estimate on how long it would take to service the drive, and there was no guarantee that my data would be preserved. In short, the process was so cumbersome that I began questioning whether it was worth the time and effort at all.

I have recently scanned message boards and learned I'm not the only one out there with this technical issue. From responses posted by users who claim to be part of the G Tech support team, it appears there is a controller board flaw that can only be corrected by an update to the firmware, but the firmware update has to be performed by G Tech. You can't do it yourself. What a waste of money. I will be very reluctant to purchase a drive from them in the future. I never had this issue with my LaCie drives.

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.

Nice looking drive. That's where the positives end, unfortunately. Mine CONSTANTLY became unresponsive, and not ONCE was it able to complete a full system back-up on my very lightly used, brand-new iMac. I finally stopped attempting to use it completely after it caused several freezes and system crashes. I called G-Tech and described the problem, and they weren't at all surprised.. apparently it's a common problem. So I sent to them to have it repaired/replaced under warranty (I had to pay the shipping), and waited. And waited... And waited. I finally called them today, almost a month and a half later to get an update and it turns out my drive has just been sitting in their lab untouched for over a month-- they haven't even started working on it yet. They will "try" to get to it soon though. All I want now is my money back, but obviously that's not an option for them.

Unreliable product, terrible customer support. Looks can definitely be deceiving.

Mac user, photography/videography...no question the best drives for my workflow and core storage needs. Quiet, portable, dependable.

This appears to be the second review here now from the mac side- it's a no brainer for mac users (as I'd read for the 2TB G-Drive when I first started buying these). I'd had mixed luck with the much cheaper Fantom drives- some worked fine and my last order I had to return due to quirky formatting and even quirkier copying via my eSATA card- and I got the ones that were supposed to have the 'better components' whatever that means. These have been nothing but easy and flawless. I choke a little on the price which is quickly forgotten when they arrive and work seamless via any connection (build quality and other features have all been elaborated on by other users and are impeccable) and I sleep at night. After a day of panic over possibly losing 350gigs of Canon 5D Mark 2 images on my last (ever) Fantom experiment to save money (copied to two of 'em for redundancy) and finally coaxing the data to copy back via USB I decided to stick with these (this is my third pair- the other four are the 2TB drives and I decided to try the 3TB). Don't know about reliability but data is copied to two of 'em. I love 'em. Summary: if it's stuff you want to keep (and you can afford them) it appears you get what you pay for. I'm very happy.

I purchased these drives because I was looking for a "professional" grade storage solution. They are NOT a professional drive, and I have had better performance and reliability from consumer grade products. The drives unmount randomly, they do not automatically remount, they drop during file transfers or other I/O operations, and they at times remain corrupted requiring repair with hard drive recovery tools. In just a few months of light use (drives used weekly for offline archiving/backups) both drives exhibit some sort of failure within 2-3 hours of use. One drive failed completely and has been replaced. (the replacement service was slow, but they handled the issue well) It breaks my heart that these drives just don't perform relative to their beautiful design, but I can not recommend these drives to anyone. The product forums are also filled with these same type of issues, please be careful before purchasing these products.