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Solid-state storage drives (SSD) are generating a lot of noise as the putative next big thing, but spinning-hard-drive storage isn't going away any time soon. In January, for example, leading drive manufacturer Seagate reported profits that were nearly triple those from the same quarter in the previous year. The dramatically lower costs of spinning hard drives vs. SSDs will continue to drive corporate (and personal) spending.
We'll look at two external arrays that employ the latest SATA-type hard drives. These products from SimpleTech and G-Technology (G-Tech) feature leading high-speed connections such as eSATA and FireWire 800. The review will be a little less competitive than I had expected, however; Fabrik announced at MacWorld that it had purchased G-Tech in an undisclosed cash-and-stock transaction.
Fabrik is on a roll. Founded in 2005 by veterans of Maxtor and Western Digital with money from Intel's venture-capital arm (among others), Fabrik bought out the consumer-product business of SimpleTech - a leading maker of hard disk drive-based external, portable, and network storage gear - in 2007.
G-Tech, meanwhile, was spun off from Medea, which itself was acquired by Avid in 2006. With its products' emphasis on FireWire connectivity and striking physical resemblance to Apple's sleek Mac Pro and G5 workstation designs, G-Tech has long been a favorite of the Mac graphics and editing crowd.
G-Tech G-RAID [subscript]2
Originally, I had planned to review one of the most recent G-Tech arrays, the G-Speed eS, with capacities of 1TB to 16TB. The unit ships with an eSATA RAID card that offloads all RAID processing. It requires a 4X slot on the motherboard. My speedy motherboard, however, lacked a 4X slot, and only smaller 1X slots were available. Too bad. The company rates the eS drive array at a very fast 135MBps throughput.
Instead, I opted for G-RAID [subscript]2 , a triple-interface array that runs to 2TB capacity. (I used the entry-level 500GB version.) The initial G-RAID, introduced in 2004, became very popular with Mac users because of its tough build and glitch-free FireWire 400 interface; later versions added FireWire 800 ports. G-RAID [subscript]2 costs less than ever, too. In 2005, a 1TB FireWire 800-enabled G-RAID came with a list price of $1,300. Today, you can get a similarly sized G-RAID [subscript]2...