G-Tech showed the G-Dock ev and G-Drive ev hard drives (shown above) at NAB 2013. I stopped by their booth to take a closer look at them.
The G-Dock ev is a Thunderbolt dock, which ships with two of the G-Drive ev drives.
These G-Drive ev hard drives feature a USB 3.0 connection and SATA connector on the back. This allows you to take the G-Drive ev units with you in the field, giving you USB 3.0 connectivity at transfer speeds up to 136MB/s. Then when you get back to home or office, you can drop the G-Drive ev units into your G-Dock ev, which uses the SATA connection.
The G-Drive ev units are a solid aluminum design, which we have come to expect from G-Tech. They are ruggedized and rated to handle drops up to a meter. And, of course, the aluminum case matches nicely with Apple’s current Mac design scheme.
In addition to the standard single-drive G-Drive ev units, G-Tech also makes a G-Drive ev Plus that will mount in the G-Dock ev. The G-Drive ev Plus features a pair of spinning drives that use hardware RAID to offer transfer speeds up to 250MB/s, which you can take advantage of using either the USB 3.0 interface as a standalone unit or via Thunderbolt when it is plugged into the G-Dock ev.
(If you want a better understanding of hard drive data transfer rates, check out my prior article Making Sense of Memory Card Read/Write Speeds and USB 3.0 / Thunderbolt Data Transfer Rates.)
The G-Dock ev ships in a JBOD configuration; however, it can also be configured in RAID 0 or RAID 1 to suit individual users’ needs. The drive bays are hot swappable and show up as individual G-Drive ev disks on the Mac desktop. There is also a Kensington lock slot on the G-D0ck ev if you are in an environment that requires you to secure it.
The G-Dock ev with (2) 1TB G-Drive ev hard drives retails for $749.95. Other configurations will be available as well. Individual G-Drive ev units will start at $149.95 for a 500GB drive.
The G-Dock ev is a brilliant product that should hit mark with loads of photographers and video pros. I spoke with several other industry pros at NAB who were very impressed with the unit as well. I think G-Tech has a real winner on its hands here.
