G-Tech launches G-Drive Thunderbolt-powered external hard drives and docks

By Gloria Sin April 8, 2013

With Sony’s 4K TVs due out later this month and its 4K movie service reportedly arriving this fall, we’ll all need faster and larger hard drives to manage all the high-resolution content that’s heading our way. G-Technology is launching a whole new slew of external storage solutions that everyone from consumers to creative professionals, like photographers and movie editors, can use with their PC or Mac.

Consumers looking for a sturdy yet light external hard drive that they can bring along on trips to back up their vacation photos and videos will like the G-Drive ev. Housed in a 0.65-inch thin, all-aluminum casing, the G-Drive ev can dissipate heat efficiently as well as help your data survive a 1-meter drop. It works with both Mac and Windows 7 and 8 computers: all you have to do is plug it into your computer’s USB 3.0 port and it will show up as an external drive. For an external drive with a read-write speed of 135 MBps, the 500GB model costs a reasonable $150, while $200 will net you a 1TB drive with double the capacity.

If you need something with a slightly faster transfer speed, G-Tech also offers the G-Drive ev Plus external hard drive that is a bit thicker than its cousin, but can read-write data at 250 MBps. While it shares all the same design features as the G-Drive ev – USB 3.0 compatible, Time Machine ready, aluminum body – it is only available with 1TB of storage for $350.

For content creators who need much more capacity than these tiny, portable external drives provide, both the G-Drive ev and G-Drive ev Plus can slide into the Thunderbolt-compatible G-Dock for even more storage options. You can set up one drive to duplicate everything on the other, use them as dual drives to double their capacity, or even daisy-chain multiple docks together for extra space and redundancy. Each G-Dock comes with two 1TB G-Drive evs for $750, so you can carry the portable drives on-location to your work site, then back up your content by popping the portable drive into the G-Dock when you get back to the office. According to G-Tech representatives we spoke to, this is a common workflow setup for shows like Saturday Night Live, where the same reel of content needs to be simultaneously edited by different people to make the show’s deadline. The dock system makes it easy to quickly copy content on to reliable, standalone drives.

Photographers and movie-makers who want to get a head-start on making 4K content (or 2K videos that the next-generation of DSLRs should be capable of) will be particularly interested in the G-Drive Pro with Thunderbolt. Introduced today at 480 MBps, it has the fastest read-write speed of all the G-Tech hard drives, which means one drive can support 1TB of unedited 2K content (it requires a 305 MBps data transfer). If you want to make full use of your Thunderbolt’s read-write speed of 750 MBps, you can daisy-chain two G-Drive Pros together to give you a whopping 960 MBps, which is just fast enough to properly handle unedited 4K videos. The G-Drive Pro is definitely priced for professionals at $850, and will be available this summer.

Editors' Recommendations