Average Reviews:
(More customer reviews)My 3TB G Drive arrived today and I was very keen on setting it up right away to test its eSATA transfer speed on my Win 7 64-bit workstation PC. Firstly, I checked over the shipment box after the UPS delivery and it was in fine condition but when I opened it up I saw that the bubble wrap was only placed in two layers on the top of the unit box instead of being wrapped around it to help protect the drive during shipment. Anyhow, it powered up fine but things were a bit confusing for me as the instructions on the included CD for Windows users to format this MAC OS drive and mount it for formatting purposes were not all that clear. So, I called G Drive tech support right away and got a very helpful person on line within a couple of minutes and he stepped me through the process which included having to go through the command prompt to isolate and "clean" the drive in preparation for mounting and formatting it for Windows' usage. However, to get to this point I had to switch from my initial eSATA connection to the provided USB 2 cable for Windows to see the drive as the drive could not be recognized otherwise.
I then rebooted with the eSATA cable connection to the G Drive but Windows would still not recognize the newly NTFS formatted drive so I called Tech Support again and got another helpful man on the phone. He concurred with the original person that I had followed the right formatting protocol but I was still unable to see the Drive in Windows Explorer unless I switched to the USB 2 connection and it popped up right away. Anyhow, he asked me to check out the drive on any other system at work with an eSATA connection and left it at that as he may have suspected my PC's eSATA ports.
I have another eSATA device (a BluRay burner) plugged in and I've had connectivity with that so I just kept rebooting my PC with various combinations (both eSATA units on/off, etc.) until suddenly a Windows message popped up saying it's installing a driver for the G Drive unit. I'm not sure why this message didn't pop up during my earlier attempts but I checked Windows Explorer and was not able to see the drive again. Finally, I had some success by re-scanning my disk arrays through Disk Management and then I could see both my eSATA units. I proceeded to copy a 36 GB block of information (over 2,700 video and image files in 107 folders) from my SCSCI RAID 0 (4, Seagate 72GB Cheetahs) drive array and the process completed in 5 minutes which works out to 120 MB/s, which is in the range of what I was told to expect with this 64MB cache 7200RPM Hitachi drive.
I loved the speed of the drive but however, in the time it took me to type the above, I again clicked on the G Drive showing in my Windows Explorer window but found it had dismounted on its own with the window hanging and a few attempts to re-scan my drives to re-locate it were unsuccessful though the drive is still running. Powering it on and off didn't help either so I'm calling Tech Support again as I'm not sure if it's a Win 7 64-bit issue or the software within the G Drive itself. I'll do an update when I find out more.
First Update:
I called Tech Support again to see if they may know of any solutions to keep my G Drive connected and online through eSATA alone and a different Tech Support person tried to help me with trouble-shooting this issue. He had me switch over to the Firewire cable and instantly Windows picked up the drive so we began to isolate the problem to my moterboard's eSATA chip software. I put my PC to sleep for the night with the G Drive off and the Firewire connection in place and when I returned to work this morning I woke the PC up and turned on the G Drive and it was picked up immediately. The only problem is that I really want to get this stability with the eSATA connection as transfering the same 36GB block of files took about 30 minutes through the Firewire 400 port on my PC, six times as long. In the meantime, I began researching more online and I believe the issue may lie with the outdated Marvel driver I have on my ASUS P5E WS Pro motherboard which is about five years old now. I've downloaded the updated driver file and I'll try that this morning as at least one person online seemed to have success with much the same board.
I bumped up my earlier rating of the G Drive by one star today as I see the loss of drive connection issue may well be with outdated drivers on my system that Win 7 64bit SP 1 with all its updates has failed to address. Hopefully, this will fix the eSATA issue and then I'd like to really put the G Drive through its paces and move it up to a full five-star rating if it holds up, as its speed, portability, and connectivity options are exactly what I'm needing for my workflow. I earlier tried out a new Seagate 3TB external drive with a USB 3 connection but I was unable to get the USB3-PCIe add-in card to fit safely in my only available PCIe slot as it's adjacent to my 64bit SCSI controller card whose hardware and data ribbon cables stick out quite a bit over this area and would be damaged by the sharp, soldered points sticking out of the back of the add-in card.
2nd. Update:
After several failed attempts to work successfully and consistently with my G Drive connected to my onboard eSATA ports I decided to pick up a PCI-eSATA card and I'm testing that out now as WIN 7 installed the necessary driver. So far so good regarding the drive not dropping connection during long transfers and being able to access the still image file and video content on it without things freezing up and getting a BSOD. However, I've noticed that write speeds have been dropping off from my initial 120MBps to around 75 - 65MBps (as of course the fastest part of the drive, the outer periphery gets copied onto first), however this is still a lot nicer than the 20MBps I was getting with USB2 and with Firewire 400, the other two connections on my PC.
The build construction of the G Drive enclosure seems very solid and I was able to pick it up on Amazon for about $90 cheaper than the local Fry's Electronics.
Click Here to see more reviews about: G-Technology G-DRIVE 3TB External Hard Drive w/ eSATA, USB 2.0, Firewire 400, Firewire 800 Interfaces 0G01973
Professional External Hard Drive: G-DRIVE high-speed interface external storage systems offer the ultimate in flexibility by providing 3Gbit eSATA, FireWire 800 (FireWire 400 via included cable) and USB 2.0 ports. G-DRIVE is the perfect high-performance solution for storage intensive applications including audio/video editing, digital photography, MP3 libraries and high-speed data backup. The system features a fan-less cooling system and the latest technology 7200 RPM SATA II hard drives with up to 2TB in storage capacity with up to 32 MB of cache. G-DRIVE supports professional music production tools including Pro Tools, Logic Studio, Cubase, Nuendo, Digital Performer, and many more. Easy to Setup – Time Machine ready! G-DRIVE is formatted at the factory HFS+ with Journaling and is Time Machine ready right out of the box! A simple initialization is all it takes to prepare G-DRIVE for use with Windows systems!
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