Performance hard drives are a niche product, and the G-Technology G-Dock ev with Thunderbolt is no exception. This hard drive cartridge system is tailor made for the video or production house that services more than a handful of artists, ones with an eye on improving workflows in their studio. In that function, it works well, but you'll certainly be paying a chunk off your capital budget for this product.
Design and Features
The G-Dock ev( at Amazon) looks like a standard desktop RAID drive, with two drive enclosures slightly protruding out of slots in the front face of the chassis. The G-Dock ev is silver-colored metal, with a perforated front panel, like a Mac Pro pre-2013. This telegraphs that this drive is made primarily for the Mac market, and the two Thunderbolt ports in the back hammer that point home quite nicely. Even though Intel has been pushing for Thunderbolt on Windows PCs, so far the majority of Thunderbolt-equipped systems are the MacBooks and iMacs.
The G-Dock ev comes as a package with the dock and two G-Drive ev 1TB drives, which go for $199.99 separately. You can also get faster G-Drive ev Plus 1TB drives separately for $349.99 each, which are thicker, faster, and obviously more expensive. Both types of modules fit into the two slots on the front of the G-Dock ev, acting like tape cartridges that you can fill up and hand carry somewhere else.
The beauty of the G-Dock ev system is that unlike proprietary cartridge drives like the Tandberg Data RDX QuikStor External ($555), the G-Dock ev essentially uses external USB 3.0 drives in nice cases as cartridges. The G-Drive ev drives have a bus-powered USB 3.0 port on the back so you can use them as portable drives in the field. The G-Drive ev Plus drives also have a USB 3.0-port on the back, but need external AC adapters to power the drives. In either case, the G-Dock ev uses drive cartridges that act like normal external drives when they are away from the base station, and that is its main point of differentiation. In the past, you either had to use proprietary cartridges like the Tandberg RDX, bare hard drives like on the DroboPro ($1,499) and CRU-DataPort ToughTech Duo 3SR ($649), or drives on sleds or brackets like the Promise Pegasus R4( at Amazon) ($1,099) and Western Digital My Book Thunderbolt Duo ($849.99). The drives compatible with the G-Dock ev work fine as standalone drives, something the five examples above can't claim.
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With the G-Dock ev, you can equip your photographers or videographers with either of these drive cartridges in the field, and using the G-Dock ev, they can quickly download their work to either their own laptops, desktops, or a central workstation back at home base. This scenario is more conducive to workflow than simply equipping your users with individual Seagate Backup Plus Portable Drive for Mac (1TB) ($129) or G-Technology G-Drive Slim ($109.99) drives. Popping a cartridge drive into a dock is much more efficient than connecting individual USB drives. Less wear and tear on connectors, too.
Your remote camera jockeys can also use the G-Drive ev cartridges like the old timers used film or videotape cartridges: physically sending a drive via DHL or Fedex may be both faster and more secure than trying to upload a set of videos or pictures via a spotty satellite Internet uplink if they're in the untamed regions of Africa or Siberia. Alternately, your users can use the G-Dock ev to backup remote offices and consolidate the backups back at the home office. This works as an offsite storage scenario or a secure file transfer scenario.
If there's any drawback to the G-Drive ev cartridges, it's that the drives have pop-off covers for their built-in SATA ports that connect internally with the G-Dock ev. Pop-off covers are easily lost when scrambling to meet a deadline. A hinged door would make more sense and be much more protective, as would a sliding door concept. Chalk that up to it being the first version of the G-Drive ev. (G-Technology, are you listening?)
The drives come free of pre-loaded software: you'll have to download any utility software from G-technology's website. The G-Dock ev is RAID 0 and RAID 1 compatible, but you'll have to set this up in OS X or Windows. The drives came pre-formatted in HFS+ for the target Mac market. We setup our G-Dock ev as both a pair of individual drives and as a RAID 0 striped array for testing, see below for the benefits. The drives and G-Dock ev comes with a three-year warranty.
Performance
The G-Dock ev combination is somewhat speedy when the drives are setup as individual drives. Our drag and drop test to ten seconds and file transfer rates were 135MBps read and 129MBps write on the AJA System test, as result echoed by the BlackMagic drive test. This jibes with G-Technolgy's claims of 136Mbps. When we linked the two drives together as a RAID 0 array, throughput improved to 5 seconds on the drag and drop test, and 254MBps read and 250MBps write on the AJA system test. To put this into perspective, the desktop-bound WD MyBook Thunderbolt drive was a smidge faster on the AJA test (257MBps read and 263MBps write) and took six seconds for the drag and drop test. The closest pocket-sized rival is the Buffalo MiniStation Thunderbolt Portable HDD (HD-PA1.0TU3) ($229.99 list), which also uses a 1TB spinning hard drive. The Buffalo MiniStation is quite a bit slower on read and write operations (110 MBps read, 96 MBps write).
That said, if you're willing to forgo storage space for performance sake, SSD-based drives like the Editors' Choice for portable rugged drives like the LaCie Rugged USB 3.0 Thunderbolt (120GB SSD)( at Amazon) ($199.99) are the real speed demons (432 MB/sec read and 191.5 MB/sec write). The G-Dock ev however gives users a good balance between speed, convenience, and price.
Ultimately, the G-Dock ev works well in the niche it's designed for: a high volume graphics or video production environment. It comes highly recommended for those types of business, though users that have different needs will be better served by other choices. General users will still find a better bang for the buck with the Seagate Backup Plus ($139). High-capacity, high-throughput single users will want the LaCie 5big( at Amazon) ($2,199), and rugged commuters who are also speed mavens will still want the LaCie Rugged USB 3.0 Thunderbolt (120GB SSD).
Performance hard drives are a niche product, and the G-Technology G-Dock ev with Thunderbolt is no exception. This one is tailor made for the video or production house that services more than a handful of artists with an eye on improving workflows in their studio.
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