KitGuru KitGuru.net – Tech News | Hardware News | Hardware Reviews | IOS | Mobile | Gaming | Graphics Cards
G-Technology, WD's professional-grade storage arm offers a wide range of desktop external drive solutions from single bay to multi bay units most of which now have Thunderbolt 3 interfaces.
The G-Speed Shuttle series are one of the more novel devices, in the fact that they have been designed to be multi-bay drive, RAID supporting units that can be carried about – think NAS with a carrying handle. With its dual Thunderbolt 3 interfaces you can chain up to 5 additional devices such as other drives, 4K displays etc.
Out of the box the G-Speed Shuttle comes with its four enterprise class drives built into a RAID 5 array but it also supports RAID 0, 1, and 10.
Strangely RAID 6 isn't mentioned in the specs for the unit, but although it may not say in the specs that it supports it, the G-Speed software utility offers it as an option and we built the drives in a RAID 6 array and tested them without any problems. Another thing to bear in mind is that the drives are not hot-swappable.
The G-Speed software is easy to install and use and it gives some of the lesser NAS OS's out there a run for their money with some of the options available. It offers full information about all aspects of the enclosure and the drives in it and it allows for quick and easy setting up of the various RAID levels supported.
The official transfer rate for the G-Speed Shuttle Thunderbolt 3 is up to 1000MB/s in a RAID 0 array. Testing the unit plugged into our standard test rig, that figure appeared to be very conservative to say the least, as in the ATTO benchmark the review unit produced a read score of 2,677MB/s.
Write performance on the other hand wasn't much to write home about at 495MB/s in RAID 0. However in our real life file transfer tests we got much closer to that official figure, the fastest transfer rate in RAID 0 being the 857.7MB/s for the 5GB Photo transfer test.
To test how quickly the drive can transfer 4K and 8K files to and from an NVMe SSD (512GB Toshiba OCZ RD400) we created two folders, one with 16GB of 4K Movie clips and the other with 40GB of 8K Movie content and timed the transfers using the FastCopy utility with the drives built in the default RAID mode of RAID 5.
The 4K folder took 28 seconds (572MB/s) to transfer to the NVMe SSD and 27 seconds (586.4MB/s) to write back the data. The 8K data took just 38 seconds (570MB/s) to transfer to the NVMe drive and just 36 (590MB/s) to come back the other way.
We found the 16TB G-Technology G-Speed Shuttle on Span.com for £1,696.80 (inc VAT) HERE
Pros.
- Read transfer speed.
- 5-year limited warranty.
- G-Speed software.
Cons.
- Doesn't support hot swapping of drives.
- Pricey.
Kitguru says: Yes it's a niche product and yes it's pricey, but if you need to physically move around very large chunks of data with full RAID protection and then transfer them at high speed, it's just the tool for the job.
