During the presentation by Western Digital today, we were introduced by another slew of products from G-Technology. They’re first bought over by Fabrik Inc., and Fabrik Inc. was eventually bought over by HGST. Then, Western Digital bought over HGST – which means Western Digital’s purchase has G-Technology bundled together too.
G-Technology is a brand of products not meant for the average consumers. It’s more towards prosumers who need fast storage for very niche demands – like portable multi-bay external storages with hot-swappable disks.
G-DRIVE mobile SSD R-Series
Their products might sound like your typical everyday storage solutions – but the design behind it is truly different. Take this portal SSD that they call the G-DRIVE mobile SSD R-Series. It doesn’t have the most appealing naming scheme, to be honest.
The G-DRIVE mobile SSD R-Series is tiny – and it’s available in 500GB, 1TB, or 2TB, with a transfer speed of up to 560MB/s. It uses USB 3.1 Gen 2, by the way. It has a theoretical maximum transfer speed of 10Gb/s. With great speed comes great heat – that’s what we found out in NAND flash technology especially in NVMe SSDs. To avoid thermal throttling, the G-DRIVE mobile SSD R-Series has a heat sink built the enclosure.
Also, it’s rated for IP67 dust- and water-resistant. Splash some water on it and you technically get liquid cooling too.
G-DRIVE with Thunderbolt 3
Then there are some other products there as well – like the G-DRIVE with Thunderbolt 3. This is an interesting product as it is meant to be an external storage device like the WD My Cloud Home and it needs its own power source.
However, the G-DRIVE with Thunderbolt 3 comes with a standard USB 3.0 micro-B connector, alongside with two Thunderbolt 3 ports with Power Delivery capability. That means you can charge your Thunderbolt 3 laptops like the new MacBook Pro or the ZenBook 3 Deluxe while transferring data!
G-SPEED Shuttle
Lastly, we also got to see the G-SPEED Shuttle. It’s an interesting solution for those who need large data storage on the go and have lots of data flying around – like a movie production set out in the wilds for example.
You’ll need some storage to offload all the captured footage so that you can capture more. That’s where the G-SPEED Shuttle comes into play.
There were two models shown – one with 4 bays and another one with 8 bays. However, in both of those models, two of the bays looked different – and they are actually SATA III hot-swap bays where you can slot in a G-DRIVE ev RaW SSD into the slot and it’ll copy all of its data into the two other drives. Both of them has a handle at the top too – which makes them easy to be transported around.
While these products are certainly not meant for the average consumers, Western Digital is aiming the G-Technology family of products to the professional photographers, videographers, musicians, movie makers, and just anyone who need large data on the go.
Pricing and availability?
Our apologies as we do not have any. These are niche products which can cost couple of thousands easily and the target market audience is not the average consumers. However, the solutions that they offer is something that piqued my interest.
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