G-Technology by Hitachi has announced that its transitioning its entire G-SPEED RAID external storage family to high-grade, enterprise-class hard drives. With solutions ranging from the new four-bay G-SPEED Q with a quad interface to the storage performance mammoth, the 16-bay Fibre Channel G-SPEED FC XL, all G-Tech G-SPEED products will feature Hitachi Ultrastar drives, one of the industry's most reliable and trusted enterprise-class hard drives that are specifically designed, manufactured and tested to meet the demanding environments found in data centers around the world.

With a continued focus on delivering the industry's most trusted, high performance, and reliable solutions for content creators, G-Tech's move to integrate enterprise-class hard drives better meets today's escalating HD video editing needs in multi-drive RAID environments. Like workloads in a data center, post-production storage solutions are accessing and streaming critical HD video as editors pore through footage to assemble the perfect sequence. These users cannot afford dropped frames, latency issues or compromised reliability as their livelihood depends on the content they create. Because of this stringent requirement, G-Tech has optimized its G-SPEED family to better balance the system requirements with hard drive features that match the rigors of the post workload.

Enterprise-Class Hard Drive Benefits

Enterprise-class SATA hard drives are specifically designed to withstand multi-user, 24x7 storage applications in systems such as network attached storage, RAID storage arrays and media servers.(1) For enhanced reliability, enterprise-class drives are rated at 1.2 million hours mean time between failure(2) (MTBF) and receive additional manufacturing testing at extended temperature ranges to ensure a target of less than one non-recoverable bit error per 10(15) bits read. They also utilize enterprise-specific firmware to minimize the performance impact of rotational vibration interference (RVI) found in rack-mounted servers and multi-drive storage arrays. In addition, enterprise-class drives are designed for a low dollar per GB ratio with higher reliability, while minimizing power consumption. Combine all this with G-Tech's proven quality reputation, and G-Tech has raised the bar in delivering storage solutions specifically designed for the professional content creation market.

"With our relentless commitment to quality and performance, our G-Tech solutions have been the go-to storage tool in the A/V industry," said Mike Williams, vice president and general manager, Branded Business for Hitachi Global Storage Technologies. "With increased demands on RAID systems for HD video editing, it is important to properly balance the system requirements with hard drive features that match the rigors of this environment. Now with enterprise-class drives, the G-SPEED family may prove to be the best RAID solutions in terms of quality, value and performance."

G-Tech is the only external storage vendor in the world with a complete line of enterprise-class 7200 RPM drive-based, RAID external storage solutions specifically designed for the A/V market. The G-SPEED family includes:

-- G-SPEED Q -- G-Tech's new high-performance, four-bay, hot-swappable RAID storage solution. Comes equipped with 3Gbit eSATA, FireWire 800, FireWire 400 (via cable) and USB 2.0. The internal RAID controller supports RAID 0 and 5. Portable, small footprint is ideal for laptop applications where high capacity and RAID protection are important. Capacities up to 8TB.

-- G-SPEED eS -- High-speed, low-cost RAID solution with 3Gbit eSATA connectivity. Ships with a RAID controller supporting levels 0, 1, 5, 10 and JBOD. Supports multi-stream SD, ProRes 422 and uncompressed HD workflows. Four-bay hot-swappable unit, starting at 8TB per unit with the ability to scale up to 32TB.

-- G-SPEED eS Pro -- Mini Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) connectivity provides Fibre Channel-like performance at a fraction of the cost. Bundled with a high-speed, eight-lane PCIe RAID controller that supports RAID levels 0, 1, 3, 5 and 6. Offers amazing speed for uncompressed HD and 2K workflows. Four-bay hot-swappable unit starts at 8TB per unit and can scale to 16TB.

-- G-SPEED eS PRO XL - High performance, huge capacity and low-cost, rack-mount storage solution for high-end HD and 2K film production. Ships with a two-port mini-SAS RAID controller card and a locking, two-meter mini-SAS cable. Can scale from a 12TB 2U solution up to 192TB. The PCIe x8 RAID controller supports JBOD and RAID levels 0, 1, 3, 5 and 6. Up to eight G-SPEED eS PRO XL units can be connected to one RAID controller card.

-- G-SPEED FC XL -- Professional 12- and 16-bay rack-mount solutions with 8Gb/s dual Fibre Channel for fail-safe SAN or adding high performance RAID storage to existing XSan2 / metaSAN networks. Easily supports multi-stream, multi-user uncompressed SD, HD and 2K post production workflows. Offers RAID levels 0, 1, 3, 5, 6 and JBOD. Capacities up to 32TB per unit. Using the available SAS expansion port, it is scalable up to 256TB by attaching G-Tech's G-SPEED eS PRO XL units to the chassis.