G-Technology Intros G-SPEED Q and the G-SPEED FC XL Storage Solutions
At the expo, G-Tech is showcasing two new additions to the G-SPEED family: the G-SPEED Q and the G-SPEED FC XL 8Gb/s Fibre Channel solution. It's clear that both of these are fairly high-brow products, marketed to give content creators, broadcasters and filmmakers "more reliable, high performance storage options to get the job done effectively, efficiently and reliably."
The new G-SPEED Q is a four-bay drive with a bunch of ports: eSATA, FireWire 800, FireWire 400 (via adapter cable) and USB 2.0. It's missing USB 3.0, which is a bit of a let down, but the other high-speed options help to ease the pain. It's sold with as much as 8TB of internal storage, and can easily hit speeds in excess of 200MB/sec using eSATA. It also supports SD and HD Final Cut Pro and Adobe Premiere compressed workflows, and there's also a built-in RAID controller. Formatted for Macs, the compact and whisper quiet G-SPEED Q features four hot-swappable Hitachi 7200 RPM 3Gbit SATA hard drives, and can be configured in RAID 0 or 5. It will be available in June throughout G-Tech’s network of resellers, with prices set at $899 for 4TB and $1,499 for 8TB.
The G-SPEED FC XL 8Gb is definitely more high-end, joining the company's current line of professional 12- and 16-bay rack mount solutions. It's billed as a simple way to deploy a fail-safe SAN or add additional high performance RAID storage to existing XSan2 / metaSAN networks, and performance of up to 700MB/sec is within reach. The G-SPEED FC XL 8Gb features the next generation Intel RAID processor with support for RAID levels 0, 1, 3, 5, 6 and JBOD. and it's available in both 2U and 3U form factors. It'll ship this May with a starting price of $8999 for a 12TB unit.
