Hitachi G-Technology Releases G-RAID Thunderbolt Storage Solution
G-Technology G-RAID Thunderbolt Specifications | |||
Capacity | 4TB | 6TB | 8TB |
Drive Configuration | 2x2TB | 2x3TB | 2x4TB |
Rotational Speed | 7200rpm | 7200rpm | 7200rpm |
Cache | 2x32MB | 2x64MB | 2x64MB |
Ports | 2x Thunderbolt | ||
Performance | Up to 280MB/s | ||
Price | $700 | $850 | $1000 |
StorageReview is also reporting that they saw an unreleased G-DRIVE with Thunderbolt support. G-DRIVE is G-RAID's little brother that has a single 3.5" hard drive. Unfortunately, there is no information on its specifications or availability.
There are quite a few Thunderbolt products out there so let's recap the external Thunderbolt storage offerings quickly. Right now there are five brands with products available for the masses: Promise, LaCie, Western Digital, Seagate and G-Technology. Most of these are external storage solutions with two or more hard drives, but there are simpler products like Seagate's GoFlex adapter that turns any GoFlex drive into a Thunderbolt drive. The table below compares products from the aforementioned companies:
Comparison of Thunderbolt Storage Solutions | |||||||||
Brand | Promise | LaCie | |||||||
Model | Pegasus R4 | Pegasus R6 | Little Big Disk | 2big | |||||
Capacity | 4x1TB | 4x2TB | 6x1TB | 6x2TB | 2x500GB | 2x1TB | 2x120GB SSD | 2x2TB | 2x3TB |
Throughput | 500MB/s | 800MB/s | 180MB/s | 190MB/s | 480MB/s | 327MB/s | |||
Price | $1149 | $1799 | $1799 | $2499 | $450 | $550 | $850 | $600 | $750 |
Warranty | Two years | Three years | |||||||
Brand | Western Digital | G-Technology | Seagate | ||||||
Model | My Book Thunderbolt Duo | G-RAID | GoFlex Desk (w/ TB adapter) | ||||||
Capacity | 2x2TB | 2x3TB | 2x2TB | 2x3TB | 2x4TB | 1TB | 2TB | 3TB | 4TB |
Throughput | 225MB/s | 250MB/s | 280MB/s | N/A | |||||
Price | $555 | $660 | $700 | $850 | $1000 | $320 | $350 | $370 | $440 |
Warranty | Three years | Three years | Two years | ||||||
3.5" hard drives top out at 4TB at the moment and thus one has to look into multi-drive solutions if more than 4TB is needed. At 6TB, Western Digital's My Book Thunderbolt Duo series offers the best price/capacity ratio. In terms of performance, however, it's rated as slower than G-Technology's and LaCie's offerings--though we need to emphasize that the performance ratings are from manufacturers' sites and may hence not be completely accurate.
G-Technology's advantage is the fact that they are the only company (along with Seagate) that is using 4TB hard drives. As Seagate does not offer any dual-drive solutions, G-Technology is the only company that offers an 8TB dual-drive product. $1000 is definitely expensive but it's $800 less than what Promise asks for their 8TB version of the Pegasus R4. However, Promise uses four 2TB drives and there is support for RAID 5 and 6 as well, so Pegasus and G-RAID aren't strictly comparable.
All in all, there are definitely a lot more products than there were a bit over a year ago when Thunderbolt launched, but personally I expected more. It has been over a year and yet the cheapest Thunderbolt storage solution will still set you back over $300. I give Seagate credit for bringing an adapter to the market instead of dedicated products like other manufacturers, but $190 for an adapter (or $100 for the 2.5" adapter) is an awful lot. For $190 you can get a 3TB USB 3.0 hard drive that will perform the same due to the fact that the hard drive is the bottleneck. Of course, the advantages of Thunderbolt lie elsewhere but given the current products, most of Thunderbolt's potential is being missed.
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AMD's Godfrey Cheng Joins Rick Bergman at Synaptics
I never quite understood the move to Synaptics, even when Bergman made it, until Godfrey's call to me today. He brought up an interesting point. A couple of years ago I wrote about an internal AMD project to build a first-generation Holodeck by 2016. The project was spearheaded by another ex-AMDer, Carrell Killebrew. At the time I was focused mostly on the compute aspects of making it happen, but Godfrey and Bergman's move to Synaptics finally clicked with me today.
I was in an unrelated meeting earlier today where I was discussing an extremely compute intensive problem with an engineer. Much to my surprise, the engineer told me that the problem we were discussing didn't require more compute than we had available today - it just needed an unbelievable amount of memory. In other words, the innovation necessary to solve this particular problem was secondary to compute.
That brings me to the Holodeck and a recent trend in the sort of innovation we've seen in the computing industry. The hard computing problems will continue to be solved by the AMDs, Intels and NVIDIAs of the world, but they've done such a good job over the past decade that the auxiliary players will now need to start playing a bigger role. We've seen this with the rise in importance of display technologies, but I suspect that companies like Synaptics that build touch and human interface controllers will also have the opportunity to move into the spotlight. Whether or not they do is another question, but the need for better interface technologies will only increase in the coming years.
I'm sure Synaptics pays well enough to attract good folks from companies like AMD and elsewhere, but I have to believe that a a not insignificant part of Godfrey and Bergman's decisions were motivated by the potential for a company focused on the human interface side of the problem.
Good luck and we'll be here to cover the progress.
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Oracle Plotted Titanic Phone-Seller From Remains of Palm, RIM
Likely ill-fated voyage never left the dock
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Bob Lutz, FedEx CEO Cite National Security as Reason to "Go Electric" with Volt, Leaf
Bob Lutz and his pals tout the benefits of domestic oil production, electric vehicles
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RIM Doesn't Want to Sell Itself, Hopes Instead for a "Strategic Investment"
Canadian smartphone maker echoes the words Palm spoke two months before its death
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UK Carriers "Hate On" Nokia Lumia 900, Don't Even Try to Promote it
"No one comes into the store and asks for a Windows phone." -- Euro executive
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Android Titan HTC Tosses CFO Amid Continued Profits, Sales Plunge
Will HTC join the likes of RIM and Palm? The handset maker has gone from sales superstar to treading water
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4/17/2012 Daily Hardware Reviews
DailyTech's roundup of hardware reviews from around the web for Tuesday
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Windows Phone's First Hit: Nokia Lumia 900 LTE Sells Out
Amazon stock is backordered, but shipping
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Boron/Carbon Nanosponges Used to Absorb Oil from Water
The nanosponges can be reused as well
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U.S. Navy Starts Search for a Sixth Generation Fighter
New fighter will complement the F-35
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IKEA Pounces Into the Consumer Electronics Market with UPPLEVA
Ikea TVs not coming to the US for now
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NASA: SpaceX Dragon Expected to Leave for ISS on April 30
According to NASA, there is a bit of testing where hardware, software and certain procedures are concerned
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Windows 8 Editions Introduced: Meet S/T, "Pro", and "RT"
New Pro version merges two premium editions of Windows 7, RT version will be dedicated to ARM support
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Review: Nokia's Lumia 900 LTE Advances the Smartphone Experience
Smartphone is marred by a few weaknesses/bugs, but overall offers more intuitive interface than competitors
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