Hitachi G-RAID 4TB 3.5" External HD

[bobcam]

Thanks for the comments, I was thinking of it for backup. I just saved some money.

[Christopher73]

Would be better off with searching their parent site you can get better/smaller drive for about same price. If you are not looking for portability there are other options as well and larger drives for not much more.

[rickinpa]

Any use as a eSATA drive to expand the storage of my DVR

[Narfcake]

I’m trying to think of a compelling reason for this … and beyond wanting (2) 2TB hard drives for placing into another computer, I can’t think of one. Even then …

• Hitachi (HGST) played it safe with their 2TB drives at the time. When the other manufacturers were going for higher density disks, HGST just stuffed 5 platters into the drive instead. Lower aerial density = lower throughput. More platters = more power needed. 400 gb/platter vs. 1+TB/platter nowadays.
• The interfaces are old. USB 2.0, eSATA 2, and Firewire … from what I can tell, these came out back in 2013.
• RAID 0 means if one drive fails, everything goes. That doesn’t make it a good backup drive.
• Likewise, if the interfacing board fails, so will your data. Judging by some Amazon reviews, this happened to multiple users.

[Narfcake]

@davidcmal

… This will have better average read times that a current 4TB single drive and have a much better write times.

One caveat - these most likely have 400gb platters, whereas a single 4TB drive would have 1TB platters. Greater aerial density = greater throughput per revolution.

@mplarkin

OK, I get that this isn’t something useful for the future. I’d like to get opinions on this use case:

I have an 8 year old MacBook with a 1TB internal drive and a 1TB external drive.
I’d like to move everything off the MacBook to archive unnecessary files, but we have more than 1TB of files between internal and external drives.

Could this be useful for this purpose and then be used as the storage device for a home media server? In addition to the MacBook, I have a Windows machine with Firewire if that makes any difference to the home server consideration. Thanks in advance for advice/insight.

For archival purposes, I’d feel much safer with a single, newer drive.

[zikzak]

@mplarkin

OK, I get that this isn’t something useful for the future. I’d like to get opinions on this use case:

I have an 8 year old MacBook with a 1TB internal drive and a 1TB external drive.
I’d like to move everything off the MacBook to archive unnecessary files, but we have more than 1TB of files between internal and external drives.

Could this be useful for this purpose and then be used as the storage device for a home media server? In addition to the MacBook, I have a Windows machine with Firewire if that makes any difference to the home server consideration. Thanks in advance for advice/insight.

(I am a long time Mac user very familiar with FireWire etc.) I would not buy this for that purpose. Since it is two drives tied together as RAID 0, I would not use this drive for long-term mass storage. It would be better to find a USB drive with a single good quality 4TB drive inside. Amazon says Seagate makes a 4TB USB 3.0 drive for about the same price as this. The G-Tech equivalent costs quite a bit more, but G-Tech is popular with photo/video/audio professionals. For home archiving/media serving you might be fine with Seagate, but as with anything, back it up.

As I wrote in my earlier post, the only way I would use this drive is if it got frequent (like daily) backups to another 4TB or more of storage. This drive is designed as a fast working drive, where files go on and off of it as projects come and go, and the files are permanently archived elsewhere. This drive itself is not suitable for archiving.

[Berlker]

I flipped a bit/byte somewhere when comparing, but stand by what I said, with the caveat that yes, you could possibly see a performance improvement from RAID 0 over the eSATA interface, if you’re one of the 8 people that actually has a port for it. If these are really terrible drives, maybe you’d see an improvement from the RAID over a FireWire 800 connection, but probably not.

For everyone else, you can spend the same amount for a brand new USB 3.0 drive at the same size from the mothership and get better performance, reliability, and portability.

[stocktons]

Bought it.

Yeah it’s slower than current spec but I’m going to use it as a backup. You can snag a config tool for the oxford chipset to hack it to raid 1. Totally planning to turn this into a 2TB mirrored array.

Since I’ll schedule the backups and have esata this was a perfect solution for me.

Thanks woot.

[xrayangiodoc]

I bought a 1TB G-Tech drive at an estate sale and have been very impressed by the quality of the case. Very heavy gauge aluminium with a very thick heatsink at the base since my model does not have a fan. I use it for file storage and would consider the 4TB model for additional storage. eSATA seems as fast as my internal drives. My biggest challenge was figuring out how to reformat the drive for Windows.

[w0stevenson]

As one of the 8 people in the world with an eSATA connection, this drive is perfect for me. I use it for video editing and need throughput, not archival stability. I bought it and tested it and am getting 250MB/sec write and read over eSATA.