Earlier this year, Western Digital (WD) acquired Hitachi Global Storage Technologies (HGST), and with it G-Technology. With HGST now operating as a wholly owned WD subsidiary, one of the first products hitting the shelves after the acquisition was the recently released G-RAID with Thunderbolt, which claims the title of the world’s highest capacity, RAID 0, Thunderbolt external storage drive.
The latest G-RAID drive is essentially identical to the G-RAID drive first shown at IBC 2011, but with the addition of Thunderbolt connectivity. The G-RAID with Thunderbolt drive is available in 4, 6 and 8 TB capacities, with two 7200 RPM Deskstar HDDs housed within the drive’s all-aluminum case, which features two Thunderbolt ports on the rear that allow for daisy chaining of up to six Thunderbolt-compatible peripherals.
Aimed primarily at audio and video professionals working on Macs, the G-RAID with Thunderbolt delivers sustained throughput of 280 MB/sec to handle multi-stream compressed HD workflows, including REDCODE, DVCPro HD, XDCAM HD and ProRes 422. The company boasts the drive can transfer a full-length, high-definition, internet-ready H.264 movie in less than a minute. And although it comes pre-formatted for Mac OS X systems, support for Windows systems is just a reformat away.
The G-RAID with Thunderbolt drive ranges in price from US$699.99 for the 4 TB model, $849.99 for the 6 TB model, and $999.99 for the 8 TB capacity unit.
Source: Hitachi Global Storage Technologies
The reviews report that the configurator does not facilitate RAID-1 usage, is USB only, and there's already negative reviews of victims with dead drives.
I've owned an 8-drive (8x2tb) RAID-5 array for a few years now - one drive fails on average every 3 months. A two-drive raid-0 unit has about the same odds of surviving as you do, if you played Russian roulette 4 times per year.
Are you sure there is not another problem?
As someone who worked in the computer industry as a systems person for a major brokerage house, I can say your failure rate is very high. We ran, depending on data on the drives either raid 1 or raid 5 at the hardware level and raid 1 or raid 5 also at the software level. This meant we had to lose 4 drives to lose data. We had over 1000 drives. We had a hardware failure on average I would say once every 3-6 months. Assuming worse case, that would be 4 a year but that was from a bank of over 1000, so the average life expectancy was like 250 years/drive.
I do however agree that RAID 0 is not a RAID technology. It has however been an accepted term for at least 20 years. Anyone that knows disk drives and the industry will know that RAID zero is just a way to layout and read data faster, not a data protection scheme.