G-Technology releases its G-RAID Thunderbolt drive, starting at $700

Jake Smith | Apr 17 2012 - 2:15 pm PT

We already took a look at Hitachi’s G-Technology’s Thunderbolt solutions at CES in January but today they are finally available to the public. The Thunderbolt version features two Thunderbolt ports, rather than the eSATA, FireWire, and USB ports found on the regular version of the G-RAID. As for the hard drives inside, there are two SATA 3Gb/s Hitachi Deskstar hard drives, which can be configured in a 4TB, 6TB, or 8TB setup, each running at 7200RPM. All three versions of the drive are priced at $700, $850, and $1,000 respectively. You can see more technical specs below, as laid out by AnandTech.

With two Thunderbolt ports, these drives can be daisy-chained together to build-out the ultimate storage solution. Currently, the G-Technology competes against four other companies in the space: LaCie, Promise, Western Digital, and Seagate. The G-Raid is the only drive that features 8TB of storage, however.

We compared the drive during this year’s CES with a few others:

Specs for the drive below:

AnandTech compared the G-RAID to other drives available on the market:

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…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.

Furthermore, StorageReview also reported that it spotted a lower end G-Drive packing a Thunderbolt port. The G-Drive is essentially a more consumer-driven drive for everyday storage, where as the G-Raid is more for the high-end market.