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iampaulb

macrumors regular
Original poster
Jul 23, 2012
136
0
London
Looking to get another ext HD for my mac, currently got a 1TB G-Tech Drive running FW800.

Just came across these guys http://www.sonnettech.com/product/ - saw at the bottom of one of their pages, their partner list some top players in the video world (see attachment) Shall i take a look at one of these drives, unfortunally my iMac was the one before thunderbolt ( :eek: :'( ) so it will have to be FW800 - or shall i just stick with good ol' G-Tech?
 

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Sonnet and G-Tech just use drives like Samsung, Seagate and Western Digital, which are available to any other enclosure manufacturer. It is the chipset in the enclosure, that is the important part, and as far as I know Sonnet and G-Tech offer excellent chipsets in their enclosures. In the beginning of the Firewire age, Oxford and TI chipsets where the ones promising good results and fast throughput, nowadays it might not be the case anymore.
I have several WD MyBook Studio edition HDDs and they often give me 60+ MB/s via Firewire 800, though eSATA (17" MBP with eSATA card) offers up to 95 MB/s with those HDDs.
 
Videoguys.com and B&H have the G-Raid 4TB for around $315. (Videoguys discounted it first, the B&H had to match it.) This is a great deal. I've been tempted to jump on this one for a few weeks, but I just bought storage a couple of months ago and can't justify it right now... now I'm hoping to hold out until I can get a Thunderbolt machine. It seems everything is moving there now, video-wise.

My only experience with Sonnet is an ExpressCard to eSATA adapter, which works great.

BTW, I think G-Tech used to exclusively use Hitachi drives, then they got bought by Hitachi, and now that storage division of Hitachi got sold off to WD.

Good luck.
 
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