Looking for an 8TB Thunderbolt drive

Looks like I can get an 8TB My Thunderbolt Duo Dual-Drive or 8TB G-RAID External Hard Drive Array with Thunderbolt for around 800.00. Any reason to go with one or the other? Looks like the G-Tech is faster but the Duo has serviceable drives? Any thoughts?

Not an answer from experience (I only have a 2TB drive), but conventional wisdom seems to indicate your answer is in the question... the one that is serviceable seems a more sound investment.

Same number of proverbial eggs, yet pluralized baskets hedge your bet by increasing odds in your favor.

Well, that was my first thought. But, I would be using raid 0, so if one drive goes down I've lost everything. Both drives have a three year warranty, so I could send either back to the manufacturer? It would be easier with the duo, but I can't imagine it would be that bad to send a drive back for a replacement?

I'm paying a premium for Thunderbolt, so do I want as fast a system as I can get? The Duo uses 5400 drives, the G-Tech 7200.

Anybody using either of these drives?

If those last two numbers you quote are RPM's then I think 7200 is the minimum for video work.

Do you feel the need for speed?
WD MyBook Thunderbolt review (6TB):
In a striped configuration we were able to perform large sequential file transfers at a rate of 220MB/s read and 262MB/s write. In a mirrored configuration, those speeds dropped to 114MB/s read and 88MB/s write.

The mirrored config isn't that fast. A single FW 800 drive gets around that transfer rate.

But the G-Tech seems to be only capable of Raid 0...

martinX wrote:
But the G-Tech seems to be only capable of Raid 0...

I'm looking into this drive also. At the same time into the LaCie Big 6TB, because of its RAID1

What you guys think?

What format are you working in? What platform are you on?

RAID 0 with 7200 rpm drives will be pretty fast but you need a second drive to back it up to.

RAID 1 gives you redundancy but I would still back it up to a second drive because what happens if one of the RAID 1 drives goes down and you have to send the whole thing back? You are also halving your storage capacity and it's not going to be as fast as RAID 0.

A 4 TB Promise RAID 5 will give you 400+ MB/sec read/write with a formatted capacity of 3 TB for about $1000 US.

Interesting - I didn't realize the G-Raid was only raid 0. Sounds like the Duo with 5400 wouldn't be that fast. So, if you are looking for raid 1 then neither of those drives is the best solution?

I'm just going to be using raid 0. I have two 3TB G-Tech FireWire drives I will use to BU my 8TB drive when I get it.

I'm on a late 2011 Macbook Pro 15" with SSD drive and 16 Gigs of ram.

Looks like LaCie makes a 6TB for 700.00 that will do raid 0 or 1, but I don't think I'm interested in raid 1. So for a 100 more I can get another two TB.

The Promise 8TB is 1650.00 - twice as much.

Leaning towards the G-Tech, but still curious if anyone has used one?

We've gone for a G-Tech Thunderbolt. We were looking at the Pegasus until I saw the read/write issues with the 4-bay version on a thread here.

I have 4 Pegasus R4's and have not had the problems the other poster has. In a little over a year I have had to replace one drive which was done on an advance exchange basis within a week. Otherwise no problems. My read/write speeds are 400 MB/sec plus. Just to be fair...

Yep. I've got an 8TB G-Raid with Thunderbolt. It's great. I'd recommend over the Pegasus for price/performance reasons (although the pegasus is great too). Bottom line, drive failure isn't all that common, and if you're really worried about it, get a cheaper non-Tbolt drive to back things up on, and just use the thunderbolt one as the primary edit drive. If you want to take advantage of the the thunderbolt speed, the GRaid or Lacie set to Raid 0 are your best bets... and if you need a Raid system, get the Pegasus.

Just ordered my 8TB G-Raid with Thunderbolt! Looking forward to trying this thing out.

JT

What is the point of making a 5400rpm thunderbolt drive? If I'm buying a thunderbolt drive I want it to actually have a fast hard drive in it.

5400? The G-Tech comes with 7200 RPM drives.

Julian wrote: What is the point of making a 5400rpm thunderbolt drive? If I'm buying a thunderbolt drive I want it to actually have a fast hard drive in it.