G-Technology G-RAID Studio 8TB

G-Technology’s high-capacity G-RAID Studio is designed for Mac users; it uses Thunderbolt 2, which is found on MacBooks and iMacs, and is styled to ape the Mac Pro workstation. It will work with a Thunderbolt-equipped PC, but there’s a performance penalty.

Only a couple of PC motherboards support Thunderbolt 2, but PCI-Express add-in cards can upgrade existing systems. Whether you go down this route or plug the G-RAID Studio into a Mac, this external hard drive will produce blisteringly fast transfer speeds.

The two hot-swappable 3.5in disks spin at 7,200rpm. You pull the disks out vertically from the top of the unit, with a pop-out cover hiding the drive trays from view. Each drive is secured to a disk caddy with four screws.

The G-RAID Studio is configured as RAID 0 out of the box, but you can switch to RAID 1 or JBOD using the free configuration utility. In RAID 0 on a Mac, formatted with the Mac OS Extended file system, it wrote large files at a rapid 312MB/s and read them at an identical speed. Small files were understandably tougher, but the drive still managed to produce 272MB/s write speeds and 272MB/s read speeds. It also impressed in our new extra-large file transfer test, which uses a mammoth 6GB video file; the G-RAID Studio both wrote and read this file at 323MB/s.

Switching to RAID 1, where files are mirrored across the two disks, transfer speeds were understandably slower, but the G-RAID Studio still produced some impressive numbers. Large files were written at 156MB/s and read at 147MB/s, small files were written and read at 153MB/s, and the extra-large files was written at 161MB/s and read at 147MB/s.

On a Thunderbolt 1-equipped PC with the disks formatted with the NTFS file system, speeds were similar when copying large files, but for small files write speeds dropped to 79MB/s and read speeds fell to 72MB/s.

The G-RAID Studio 8TB is expensive, but it is fast. The Thunderbolt connection means it isn’t practical for non-Mac users, unless you buy an add-in card or swap motherboards, but based on the speeds and capacity we’d say it’s worth the extra effort if you’re after fast external storage with built-in redundancy.