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Another G-Tech RAID5 Unit Arrives

We've bought yet another G-Tech G-Speed Studio R Thunderbolt2 four disc RAID5 array for our new Mac Pro editing bay, along with a spare drive. Whilst not the quietest RAID unit available it was recently on offer (at just £725 excluding VAT), that's about half the cost of the last one we bought! I suspect G-Tech are moving to a Thunderbolt3 design soon, and one that does not "mimic" the current new Mac Pro Trashcan look. Hence the superb price!

GSpeed Units (600x450)

Since we're shooting more and more in 4K now you can never have enough drives. We've got dozens of Terabytes of various G-Tech (and other) drives in our studio, but it never seems enough! Also, having this second unit gives us an instant back-up to carry on editing (and I mean immediately!), should one of the 4 drives fail (in either unit). We always have several (frequently updated) copies of all "work in progress" client project files/raw media on various drives (including some in the safe) to resort to - and now on both these units too.

Although, touch wood, I've never needed it, these G-Speed RAID5 array units will re-build the data should one disc in the 4 disc array fail - one of the advantages of RAID5 over RAID0 (and RAID5 is plenty fast enough for multilayer editing on 4K timelines in Adobe CC with the spec of nMP we have. You just remove the faulty drive and put the spare one in. However, I've read it can take many hours, perhaps a day, for the controller in the G-Tech unit to rebuild a RAID5 array with a replaced drive. So, having this additional unit just means we have a bit more peace of mind when working on tight deadline, time critical work we do for some of our big clients. Peace of mind is GOOD!