G-Speed Studio 24TB RAID Storage Solution Takes on Mac Pro Design

The music in that video is so annoying. All the music in these weird "tech/startup/product intro" videos are all the same. Is this the new equivalent to that 50's-sounding window browsing music?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nZe8Uvf2emw

Let me quick go turn on my Mac Pro... oh crap, I turned on my storage device instead! How stupid am I, couldn't even tell the difference.

Seems expensive. Lacie as a 12TB dual drive RAID 0/1 Thunderbolt 2 solution coming out that's $999. Can't see using 4 drives warrants double the cost.

Maybe I'm just missing something.

The cost is massively unjustified regardless of specs.

You can buy 4 x 4TB Western Digital RED drives for £500 all-in, then add either of the following and still be paying half the price it's likely to cost in £: -

+£399: - OWC ThunderBay IV.

This would make it £899 in total for a 16Tb system with dual Thunderbolt ports and built-in RAID.

Then if you want to add an extra drive at a later date for redundancy or extra storage there's this: -

+£449: - Drobo DRDR5A31 5D (Diskless) 5 Bay Desktop DAS Enclosure.

Not sure how reliable Drobo is because I've read they're garbage.

(I'm accounting for the fact US prices tend to equal UK prices more or less due to exchange rate and 20% VAT and those UK prices are the cheapest I could find with online retailer discounts but even if prices are significantly lower in the states, that just makes the bloated prices of these systems even worse).

theFly said:

Seems expensive. Lacie as a 12TB dual drive RAID 0/1 Thunderbolt 2 solution coming out that's $999. Can't see using 4 drives warrants double the cost.

Maybe I'm just missing something.

Click to expand...

You can't see the advantage of striping/mirroring with parity over without parity? Really?

----------

barkmonster said:

The cost is massively unjustified regardless of specs.

You can buy 4 x 4TB Western Digital RED drives for £500 all-in, then add either of the following and still be paying half the price it's likely to cost in £: -

+£399: - OWC ThunderBay IV.

This would make it £899 in total for a 16Tb system with dual Thunderbolt ports and built-in RAID.

Then if you want to add an extra drive at a later date for redundancy or extra storage there's this: -

+£449: - Drobo DRDR5A31 5D (Diskless) 5 Bay Desktop DAS Enclosure.

Not sure how reliable Drobo is because I've read they're garbage.

(I'm accounting for the fact US prices tend to equal UK prices more or less due to exchange rate and 20% VAT and those UK prices are the cheapest I could find with online retailer discounts but even if prices are significantly lower in the states, that just makes the bloated prices of these systems even worse).

Click to expand...

The price is actually on par with a lot of similar products.

----------

joshwenke said:

Let me quick go turn on my Mac Pro... oh crap, I turned on my storage device instead! How stupid am I, couldn't even tell the difference.

Click to expand...

The stupid part is you turned them off to begin with.

If it's black, it's not a match... The Mac Pro is space gray chrome, like the logo or chamfer on an iPhone or iPad. It's a puzzle why Apple makes them look black in their promo pictures.

24TB? ... A few years time and it comes as memory cards

Iconoclysm said:

The price is actually on par with a lot of similar products.

Click to expand...

Equally over-priced products when there's equally functioning products that can be assembled with drives of your own choice that either meet or exceed the specs of the drives you HAVE to buy with these pre-fitted Thunderbolt RAID systems and pay through the nose for them.

Avieshek said:

24TB? ... A few years time and it comes as memory cards

Click to expand...

More like a decade or two. You need something like 4-6nm stacked/3D NANDs to fit 24TB in a small form factor like a memory card or even a 2.5".

It's taking Intel longer and longer (also incredibly more expensive) to shrink their chips, the same will happen to all NAND fabs.

The profit margins they're making off the SSDs are declining each year because they have to spend more of their profits to invest in the next shrink process. Nobody is going to spend $20 billion dollars just to get more capacity in a smaller drive that is still a small market and likely to bankrupt the company in the long run. That's why you'll be seeing more consolidations in the SSD market soon as Sandisk just bought Fusion-iO today, after Seagate just bought SandForce division from LSI.

Expect the SSD market to look like the hard drive market from 5 years ago with 3-4 big companies, like WD, Seagate, Sandisk, and so on.

barkmonster said:

Equally over-priced products when there's equally functioning products that can be assembled with drives of your own choice that either meet or exceed the specs of the drives you HAVE to buy with these pre-fitted Thunderbolt RAID systems and pay through the nose for them.

Click to expand...

You could make that argument all day long with just about anything. You can build your own high end computer for much less than you can purchase a Mac Pro.

Some people don't want to dink around with putting together their own setup and are willing to pay extra to avoid hassle. This product is for those people.

ugahairydawgs said:

You could make that argument all day long with just about anything. You can build your own high end computer for much less than you can purchase a Mac Pro.

Some people don't want to dink around with putting together their own setup and are willing to pay extra to avoid hassle. This product is for those people.

Click to expand...

And those people are generally professionals (make a living off of what they're doing) and compatibility and speed are more important than price, which I bet their employers are paying as these tend to be company property.

I don't understand why someone doesn't pickup a Drobo B800i or Synology iSCSI device?

You mount it on a rack or cabinet and never have to look at it. And it runs similar in price.

I don't want 1 trash can on my desk, never mind 2.

One reason I believe that it is expensive is because they state that the drives are enterprise-class drives, which usually are more expensive than consumer-class drives. This is aimed at pro users, enterprise/studio use. G-tech makes plenty of consumer drives. Get one of those instead!

the nice thing about new new one is that you can replace the drives. I don't think that was possible with the older version.
I wonder how it compares to the Pegasus 2

puckhead193 said:

the nice thing about new new one is that you can replace the drives. I don't think that was possible with the older version.
I wonder how it compares to the Pegasus 2

Click to expand...

I bought the previous generation G Speed back in 2011 (the aluminium one) for my business, and it still works great. The drives are easy swappable. You barely hear them working.

einsteinbqat said:

One reason I believe that it is expensive is because they state that the drives are enterprise-class drives, which usually are more expensive than consumer-class drives. This is aimed at pro users, enterprise/studio use. G-tech makes plenty of consumer drives. Get one of those instead!

Click to expand...

While enterprise hard disks do cost more, they still don't cost a whole lot. For instance, WDC's 4TB high-end Se enterprise hard disk costs $250 each and Seagate's Enterprise Capacity 6TB costs $450 each.

G-Speed is effectively charging about $1500-1700 for the chassis.

I wouldn't mind spending all day in THAT second office!

joshwenke said:

Let me quick go turn on my Mac Pro... oh crap, I turned on my storage device instead! How stupid am I, couldn't even tell the difference.

Click to expand...

you should write a sitcom lol

These are probably on a par with the Pegasus 2, both in price and performance.

Question then is: what competitive edge do G-Tech have over the Pegasus 2, as they both come with enterprise level disks?**

Answer: not much, except that they attempted to make the G-Tech thing look like a nMacPro.

Yawn. Why even bother. Pegasus can be stored more easily, being square.

(** I have 2x Pegasus 1 R6's and swapped-out the 2TB HDDs for 4TB consumer Hitachi ones in RAID 5, and they work just fine anyway ...the key here being that redundancy isn't my backup solution. Though advice is to use with a Corning 10m optical Tbolt cable in order to store them away in a closet, makes life nice and quiet all 'round!)

________
Should also add that Thunderbolt 3 is in testing, with one making a guess for likely release over the next 12-18 months or so. Hence a lot a cash going down now, when a "bigger better faster stronger" solution soon cometh ...as ever with technology "when does one jump on board", hey!

• 40Gbps with more protocol support, ouch! https://www.macrumors.com/2014/04/21/thunderbolt-third-generation-details

puckhead193 said:

the nice thing about new new one is that you can replace the drives. I don't think that was possible with the older version...

Click to expand...

Isn't the point of a RAID setup that you can replace drives if they fail?

I doubt his second office is really that tidy and well lit.

MikhailT said:

More like a decade or two. You need something like 4-6nm stacked/3D NANDs to fit 24TB in a small form factor like a memory card or even a 2.5".

It's taking Intel longer and longer (also incredibly more expensive) to shrink their chips, the same will happen to all NAND fabs.

The profit margins they're making off the SSDs are declining each year because they have to spend more of their profits to invest in the next shrink process. Nobody is going to spend $20 billion dollars just to get more capacity in a smaller drive that is still a small market and likely to bankrupt the company in the long run. That's why you'll be seeing more consolidations in the SSD market soon as Sandisk just bought Fusion-iO today, after Seagate just bought SandForce division from LSI.

Expect the SSD market to look like the hard drive market from 5 years ago with 3-4 big companies, like WD, Seagate, Sandisk, and so on.

Click to expand...

Graphene.

Drobo?

Drobo 5D 20TB Bundle with 5 x 4TB Seagate SATA Hard Drives #DRDR5A21-ST4000-5
Our Price: $1,688.00

Yea, that's what I would get. With a Transporter Sync-another $100

timshundo said:

The music in that video is so annoying. All the music in these weird "tech/startup/product intro" videos are all the same. Is this the new equivalent to that 50's-sounding window browsing music?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nZe8Uvf2emw

Click to expand...

"Sterile" is the latest fad. And I hate it as much as you do.