The G-Technology G-Drive Slim ($109.99 list) is a nice looking, shiny hard drive for the Mac user. Its aluminum shell matches the one on your MacBook Pro or MacBook Air, down to the shimmery metal flecks in the finish. Now that MacBooks are moving to expensive (but fast) flash storage, you'll need a large-capacity external drive or NAS server to store all your photo and video files. It's certainly a perfect match physically for your slim MacBook Air. The G-Drive Slim is a 500GB sidecar for your MacBook, but is it a better buy than a commodity hard drive?
Design and Features
The G-Drive Slim is compact, since it uses a 7mm tall mechanism for its 500GB drive. Aimed at MacBook users, the drive comes encased in matte aluminum with a black metal ring around the rim of the chassis. The slightly shimmery finish on the G-Drive Slim is a close match for the aluminum surface on a unibody MacBook Pro or MacBook Air. The drive's chrome G-Technology logo, USB 3.0 micro-b connector, and simple LED drive light are the only adornments. The bottom of the case houses the drive's serial number and model number labels. The drive is slimmer than most: about 0.4 by 3.25 by 5 inches (HWD), which slightly longer and wider than an iPhone 4S, but about as thin. Other drives that tout their compact portability are the Seagate GoFlex Slim ($99.99 list, 4 stars) and the Iomega Helium Portable Hard Drive ($199.99 list, 3 stars). The G-Drive Slim will fit in your commute case easily, even if you use a tight-fitting neoprene sleeve as your carrying case.
The drive comes without any software installers, and it comes pre-formatted for HFS+. That way the G-Drive Slim is ready for Time Machine out of the box. All modern Macs using OS X 10.5 or newer come with Time Machine backup standard, just plug in the drive and your Mac will ask you to use the drive for backup. The drive will work with third party backup solutions as well. Or you can simply manually copy your files to the drive occasionally for backup or transport to other computers. You can reformat the drive as NTFS for Windows (as we did for our PCMark testing). You can also format the drive as FAT32 for use on both Mac and Windows computers. The drive comes with a USB 3.0 cable, which has a blue-colored connector matching the USB 3.0 port on many systems.
Performance
The G-Drive Slim is a reasonably fast USB 3.0 hard drive, depending on the age of your Mac. Older Macs using USB 2.0 ports took 47 seconds to transfer our standard 1.2GB test folder. Newer Macs with USB 3.0 ports took 20 seconds on the same test. The Iomega Helium took 42 seconds with the same folder on USB 2.0 (the Helium is USB 2.0-only). The faster Seagate GoFlex Slim took 15 seconds to copy the folder.
We reformatted the drive to run Windows-based hard drive tests. It scored 5,328 points on PCMark05 and 1,322 points on PCMark7. This is comparable to the Buffalo MiniStation Thunderbolt Portable HDD (HD-PA1.0TU3) ($229.99 list, 4 stars) in USB 3.0 mode. On the AJA system test, the G-Drive Slim recorded a passable 108 MBps read and 107 MBps write throughput, much faster than the USB 2.0 Iomega Helium (37 MBps Read, 27 MBps write) and competitive with the Buffalo MiniStation in USB 3.0 mode (110 MBps read, 96 MBps write). Both the Buffalo and G-Drive Slim should be fine for quick video editing projects and still graphics arts.
The G-Technology G-Drive Slim has a lot to like. It's more compact that even the Buffalo MiniStation and our current Editors' Choice for portable hard drives, the Seagate Backup Plus ($139.99 list, 4.5 stars). The G-Drive Slim certainly a better choice than the USB 2.0-only Iomega Helium drive. However, at list price the Seagate Backup Plus is a better choice on a dollar per GB basis: The G-Drive costs 22 cents a GB, while the Seagate is about 14 cents per GB. The Seagate is only $30 more expensive for double the storage.
COMPARISON TABLE
Compare the Buffalo MiniStation Cobalt USB 3.0 with several other hard drive side by side.
More hard drive reviews:
??? G-Technology G-Drive Slim
??? Western Digital My Passport Edge
??? Western Digital VelociRaptor (1TB)
??? Western Digital My Book VelociRaptor Duo
??? LaCie Rugged USB 3.0 Thunderbolt (120GB SSD)
?? more
Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/ziffdavis/pcmag/~3/G3CVGCMHIcM/0,2817,2410925,00.asp
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