Portable G-Tech G-Raid mini HDD - now 640GB!

[noetus]

In case anyone is wondering whether the excellent G-Raid portable Firewire 800/400/USB drives can be upgraded with bigger hard drives, the answer is: yes they can!

At present the largest G-Raid portable drive (twin drives in Raid 0 configuration in a portable enclosure) is 500GB. In the enclosure are two 250GB drives. I bought one of these enclosures and replaced the 250GB drives with Western Digital 320GB drives, so now I have an external drive of 640GB. There is a slight power issue which I've managed to find a work-around for in case anyone wants to repeat this exercise. As soon as the Samsung Spinpoint M6 500GB drive is actually shipping, with 9.5mm height, we *should* be able to get a portable drive of 1TB capacity, although until someone actually tries it we won't know if there will be enough power from the Firewire port for two of these drives running simultaneously. (Note that opening the case of the G-Tech G-Raid mini invalidates the warranty, although the swap is straightforward and not that much more difficult than on a standard single drive enclosure.)

In the meantime, note that the G-Raid Mini 500GB external drive can still hold its own, despite the introduction of 500GB laptop drives, since its Raid 0 configuration makes data read and write operations significantly faster than with a single drive.

 

[alphaod]

I don't understand the point of the external RAID drives; sure if it were eSATA I might understand but FW/USB? And it's not fun to have one drive die and lose all your data!

 

[noetus]

Have you tried Firewire 800? It's pretty fast. With these external enclosures you actually get faster performance than with the internal MBP drive! I tried installing Mac OS X on the external drive, and enjoyed a noticeably faster boot time. This isn't the main point, though (who wants to boot from an external except in emergencies or for special tasks like defragging?). Ever tried copying a 20GB video file to a USB external? It's pretty onerous. Try it with this setup over Firewire 800 and you'll see significantly shorter copy times.

So I think there is a point, but to each his own. Also, of course, you get loads more capacity. Having this portable drive means I no longer need my big clunky 3.5" enclosure with its big clunky power supply. Wherever I go, my data goes.

So another point. But again, to each his or her own.

Yes, you do double the chance of data loss. That's true. But it makes absolutely no difference to me, or anyone else who is rational about this. Why? Well, if you're concerned about data loss (and everyone is, or should be), you're going to make backups, right? OK, so far so good. Does it matter how often you backup whether your chance of data loss is halved or doubled? Of course not! You don't know what your chance of data loss is in the first place. You might have a drive that will last 100 years. Or you might buy a brand new drive that will fail tomorrow. In the face of near total ignorance about how long your drive is going to last to begin with, doubling the chance of data loss by using two drives in RAID 0 makes no difference to decisions about backups to anyone who is rational about making backups.

Just my 2cents.

Oh, and by the way, these drives look really cool. Third point

 

[magid]

I don't understand the point of the external RAID drives; sure if it were eSATA I might understand but FW/USB? And it's not fun to have one drive die and lose all your data!

What would be the diff if it were connected through esata as opposed to fw/usb? I dont believe esata is that much faster if at all than fw800.

also, your location says lie x37, like roslyn on long island?