We all know you should never keep your data all in one place. Lots of Copies Keep Stuff Safe (LOCKSS) as they say. But even once you've gotten your raw dailies backed up onto hard disk drives, with one set in your closet and another set stored in a fireproof safe in your cousin's garage in another hemisphere, you still need a fast, reliable drive for day-to-day work. Increasingly, solid-state drives (SSDs) are becoming a popular option for daily work drives, where the extra speed is worth the extra cost. With the new R-Series drives, G-Technology is aiming squarely at that market—the drive you can keep with you in your backpack at all times that can survive the rugged life of being the working drive for a filmmaker.
Shock and vibration resistant (the "r is for rugged"), R-Series drives are designed to withstand falls up to 3m, or nearly 10 feet. While most filmmakers drop their drives from waist or desk height, sometimes a drive will fall off the top of a ladder, and it's good to have extra protection built in. Just because it's designed for it doesn't mean you should rely on it, and you shouldn't drop the drive every morning from 10 feet and expect it to last forever, though we do expect to see some stunt YouTube videos dropping the drive from the top of a building and seeing if the data survives. This extra protection is especially interesting when added on top of the SSD drive. SSDs have traditionally already been more durable than HDD (hard disk drives), so the added protection of a rugged case should make this especially stable.
G-DRIVE mobile R-Series SSDCredit: G-Technology
It wouldn't be an SSD if we didn't talk about speed. With transfer speeds of up to 560MB/s, up to five times than the average HDD, the R-Series drives should make your day-to-day workflow faster. If you are running footage over to a friend's house or a post facility, this will lead to faster read-and-write speed for major files, which will speed up your day and let you spend more time working and less time watching the progress bar in the Resolve clone tool.
Of course, SSD drives do come at a price, with the 512GB drive coming in at $199 from B&H, and topping out at 2TB for $699. This is definitely not cheap, and these drives aren't going to be where you store multiple copies of your dailies. But as a runaround delivery drive you need to use day in and day out for transfers, editing, and delivery, the speed and durability benefits should be worth the extra cost. The R-Series also comes combined with a 5-year limited warranty, which is an exceptionally long time in the hard drive industry.
Tech Specs
- USB 3.1 gen 2
- 560MB/s
- 3m drop protection on a carpeted, concrete floor
- 5-year limited warranty
