Firewire 800 based External Drives are showing that they are a great solution for high-speed storage. Traditionally we’ve always said to go internal for your drives and that is still your safest bet. But what if you need to edit between two different workstations, say for instance at the studio and then on the road. What if you just want more streams of RealTime video? You know Picture-in-picture times five with a cool motion background plus a motion graphic flying across with text reading, "This is Real-Time baby!" That’s when you need to take a closer look at the G-RAID.

Bottom line: If you want 25% faster speed than what your computer shipped with – get a G-RAID!

In testing with Intech’s QuickBench speed tools, we found the G-RAID to be 25% faster for READ speeds than the Internal SATA drive of a PowerMac G5 Dual 1.8GHz. Why is this important? Simply put, you can add more streams of video to your timeline with less likelihood of dropping frames. So it must be hard to set-up right? Nope, it’s very easy to connect with just one cable to the computer and one for power. Heck, I didn’t even have to format mine, it just showed up on the desktop.

Now whereas other drives out there are advertising crazy numbers for speed that are rated in certain "fast" areas of the drive, that’s not the case here, you’re guaranteed that the G-RAID is performing at top speeds spanning across the entire disk. That’s right, even when almost full.

WRITE speeds were about the same vs. the internal drive. The G-RAID does have a small internal fan that sucks in air through the perfed holes just like the G-5. Remember heat is a drives’ worst enemy and this thing is well, just cool!

For the ultra-geeks out there, the G-RAID has an on-board RAID controller with both a FireWire 800 port as well as a FireWire 400 port. With the FireWire 400 port you can still connect to say an iMac, iBook, older PowerBook or PowerMac G4 if you needed to but you won’t get that FireWire 800 screamin’ speed. FireWire 800 PCMCIA cards for older laptops and PCI cards for desktops are also available if you need them. If you wanted to take speed one step further, you could even put two of these together, each on a separate bus and do HD! With capacities up to 800GB with the largest model, that’s 1.6TB of space!

Now as for looks, you’ll just have to see one of these bad boys in person to really get a grasp of what I’m talking about. These drives are simply gorgeous. Especially when sitting on top of a G5. G-Technology and Medea really did a great job with the design as well as the components used. This thing screams quality. I give it two thumbs up!

FireWire 800 G-RAID 320GB
Availability: Usually ships the same / next business day
Price: $399.00

FireWire 800 G-RAID 500GB
Availability: Usually ships the same / next business day
Price: $549.00

FireWire 800 G-RAID 800GB
Availability: Usually ships the same / next business day
Price: $999.95

FireWire 800 G-RAID 1 TB
Availability: Usually ships the same / next business day
Price: $1199.95

FireWire 800 PCI card (for desktops Mac or PC)
Availability: Usually ships the same / next business day
Price: $79.00

FireWire 800 PCMCIA Cardbus card (for laptops Mac or PC)
Availability: Usually ships the same / next business day
Price: $79.00