G-Technology’s Favorite Portable Hard Drive Just Got Bigger

News

by Tim FokAugust 12^th, 2016

G-Technology has expanded their ev Drive line-up, doubling its maximum capacity to 2TB. The highly versatile Evolution Series drives can be used as a stand alone rugged USB 3 portable hard drive or plugged into a Shuttle for quick offload and duplication.

The G-Drive ev has been around for some time, with G-Technology gradually increasing their specification list and compatibility with the rest of the hard drives in their Evolution range.

Their latest release is the 2TB G-Drive ev. This will be available in hard disk form only, with SSD versions currently still capping out at 1TB. It’s almost identical to the 1TB version, except for being just a few millimetres thicker and therefore not compatible with their ATC casing.

As a standalone drive, the G-Drive ev is a rugged USB 3.0 portable hard drive. It has a drop rate of 1.5 metres (1.2 metres without removable bumper) and a transfer rate of up to 136MB/s, or 425MB/s for the SSD version.

Remove the bumper and it becomes a pre-caddied drive for G-Technology’s G-Dock ev or G-Speed Shuttles. This saves the hassle of additional cables and caddies, giving your portable drive instant access to your desktop system through the SATA connection point on the G-Drive ev.

For me, the bottleneck of the G-Drive ev system as a portable drive solution has always been capacity. With data per project quickly expanding with the likes of 4K acquisition, a set of 1TB portable hard drives as backup seems a little… measly.

I own 4 G-Drive ev’s as my on-site backups. What was once two independent cloned systems that I can use separately on back to back jobs is more frequently becoming 2 x 1TB hard drives with 2 backups per job.

The addition of a 2TB G-Drive ev is nice, without the need for going with a desktop system, or the ev 220 that requires two USB ports (which is faster, as it’s essentially two 1TB drives striped together as a Raid-0).

Keep an eye out for more new ev products from G-Technology in the fall. It’s certainly an interesting line up, with the new G-Speed Shuttles and perhaps more importantly their expansion into disk readers. We’ve already seen the RED mag ev reader and prototypes of an Atomos caddy version, with more rumoured to be just around the corner.