Review of the g-safe raid hard drive by wildlife photographer richard costin

Dec. 2007 - Revision 1

Before I get into the review I request that you do one thing..

Stop reading this and if you haven’t already, backup your images/data now!

Welcome back. Now that’s done I want you to think for one minute what would it be like if you lost all your digital images. Whether you are a professional, amateur or casual snapper, losing your images can range from simply annoying to catastrophic. The worst might be losing precious family photos or all your images form that expensive shoot you arranged in some far away land with the potential to ruin your business and reputation.

Computer techie types have always been hammering on about backup and large companies often have departments dedicated to this single purpose. It is important to realise that computers and especially their hard drives are very fragile things. The slightest error can cause any number of problems with the potential to make your data irretrievable even by experts. Let’s not forget virus and good old human error. With the vast storage space we all have access to, one incident can wipe out every digital or scanned photo you have. Ouch.

The key here is workflow; little and often is best in a structured form that minimises the time your data is unprotected and maximises the time you can spend on other things. Taking pictures maybe?

I recently had the pleasure of learning the hard way and I really should have known better.

I hadn’t backed up my main photo hard drive in a month and this was the time it decided to die on me. Thankfully this story has a happy albeit expensive ending, courtesy of a UK based data recovery centre spending over a month working on the drive. It was a much needed eye opener and I am glad it happened sooner rather than later. After a little kicking myself and some research, I bought myself a raid1 external hard drive.

Enter the G-Safe 250GB by G-Technology....

Let’s get the tech blurb out of the way first..

Raid stands for a “Redundant Array of Inexpensive Devices”. To put it another way, some standard off the shelf hard drives that work together in various configurations. There are several types of raid, but the two you are likely to encounter are type 0 and 1. Type 0 is for speed; spreading each file across two drives (half and half) allowing them to be read twice as quickly, also called striping. The type that is relevant here is type 1, whereby all modifications to the first drive happen to the second; also known as mirroring. This has the advantage that if one drive fails, all the data is alive and well on the (hopefully) healthy second drive. The killer advantage here is that this all happens quickly and transparently to the user. When plugged in, your operating system of choice sees only a single drive, the fancy backing up is done silently in the background. The drive comes pre-prepared for the mac operating system but includes easy instructions to get it up and running under windows.

So, onto the hardware itself...

The G-Safe package simply consists of a power lead, (no separate adapter box required); a usb2.0 lead, firewire 800 lead and of course the unit itself. Note that firewire 400 users will need to purchase a separate lead.

The main reason I chose the G-Safe was for simplicity and performance, they also have a good reputation for quality products. Anything written to the hard drive is simultaneously written to both. Best of all this is handled by the G-Safe hardware so there is no performance hit to the operating system. As I work with my images (or any other data), all my changes are made to both drives instantly. Simple and effective, two of my favourite words!

To add to this simplicity, should one hard drive fail, the unit immediately lets you know via the lcd screen and a very loud (mutable once you get the message) beep. It is then a case of removing one of the drives and replacing it, upon which the G-safe hardware will automatically begin to transfer your data onto the fresh drive (as shown in the image on page 1). The beauty is that this can all be done without rebooting and you can keep working with the data from the good drive whilst it gets on with it. Simple and effective.

Connectivity wise you have plenty of options: USB2, standard firewire 400 and the new, faster firewire 800. I have tested all three options which work well but for optimum/faster performance firewire 800 is the one. Most new macs come with firewire 800 but most PCs will need a firewire 800 card installed. However the other two options give good performance and I wouldn't have a problem using them. In terms of speed drive performs well, although it is not as fast as its raid0 brother the G-Raid. Data safety is given priority but it is still fast enough for pumping up raw images to Lightroom, the hard drive can pump out raw files faster than the CPU can usually process them anyway.

I never like to rely on waiting for something to happen to test it so I pulled one of the drives from the bay during mid use to see what would happen. The first thing I noticed was the loud “BEEP” emanating from the unit (the mute button soon took care of that); the lcd also displayed information on which drive had failed, (in this case the lower, drive two).

As far as windows was concerned nothing was amiss and the G-Safe continued to churn out data as normal. A few test read/write operations later I re-inserted the drive tray. G-Safe picked up on this, asking me (on the built in lcd, not in windows) if I wish to rebuild the drive, I simply pressed enter and 45 minutes later both drives were in sync again. All the while I could keep working with the data in windows. Fantastic!

Most of the cost of the G-Raid is for the chassis and the electronics within. If your data, and the ability to use it whenever you need to is important then I suggest you invest in a spare hard drive for the unit to keep on standby. The G-Safe uses standard Hitachi 250 Gigabyte deskstar SATA hard drives, available from many retailers. You will need to buy the same model drive as is contained within your unit and I obtained mine with no problem for £35 online. This means that should a drive fail, I can pop the replacement in and have my images backed up as quickly as possible while the failed drive is sent off for warranty replacement (or the bin). Each hard drive sits in a provided caddy tray which is easily removed via a small key and lever system. The failed drive can then be easily swapped for the fresh one by simply undoing a few screws on the side and slotting the new drive in. The unit takes care of the rest.

Drive 1 being removed from the unit

One of the hitachi hard drives.

The option for easy 3rd drive backup is available. To do this, all you would have to do is swap the second drive around for the spare as regulary as you see fit and rebuild the data to it each time. Should even both drives fail, you can power down, remove them, pop the 3rd drive in and power up. Then put in another drive and the unit will ask if you wish to rebuild to it. And while this rebuild is going on you can still use your data, (which takes priority over the rebuild, so the rebuild will take longer if you are using the drive at the same time).

I also suspect you could buy two larger drives and replace the 250 gig drives; giving you more space at a later date. I have yet to confirm this though!

So, is this an end to all the manual backups?

No.

Now, there are several things you should bear in mind when using this unit, as the worst type of security is a false sense thereof.

Nothing is foolproof. This unit is designed to reasonably protect you from hardware failure. Sod’s law can show its face here and two drives can bite the dust at once. To protect against that, you will need to get more heavy duty raid systems utilising more drives and costing more money. How much is your data and its availability worth to you?

G-Technology has a higher end product called the G-Speed-es which allows you to use four drives, but at extra financial cost.

Also an important factor is that the G-Safe can’t protect you from viruses and user error. If the unit receives the command to delete a file/folder, be it from you or a virus it will do just that, wiping from both drives. For this reason I recommend having at least a third drive to back up to which you only connect to your computer during a backup session. My personal preference is to burn all the raws to dvds just after import into Lightroom and before deleting them from your memory cards/downloader. Remember, the more places your images are at once the better protected you are. If worst comes to the worst, I can pull the raws back and re-process my images, which is better than no images at all. The G-Safe protects me against the most likely disaster - disk failure. This give me a healthy compromise between safety and convenience. Off site backups are also strongly recommended in case of fire and theft! A good general rule of thumb is never to be happy when your images are in only one location and never to even think about resting easy until they are at three difference locations, with at least one off site storage.

The short story simply is that the G-Safe enables me to have an instant 100% up to date backup of all my images in real time with zero effort and no downtime if one drive fails, since the chance of two drives failing at once is slim (although it does happen). If it does, at least I’m covered with my offsite dvds!

As you can probably see, I am very pleased with the G-Safe, and heartily recommend it. But are there any negatives? Yes a few, but they are small and don’t greatly effect my overall opinion. Still, they are worth a mention. The first is noise. The unit has a heavy duty fan at the back to cool the hard drives (a good thing). This however is a rather noisy affair. As is usual with computer fans you don’t realise how loud it is until you switch it off. Lastly, considering the individual Hitachi hard drives are £30 each; the asking price of £259.00 without VAT seems a little steep but is somewhat justified by the build quality. Metal and built to last. Also the electronics controlling the drive has thus far worked flawlessly and have given me no problems whatsoever.

All in all, I can thoroughly recommend the G-Safe hard drive and feel more confident now that I am using it. Never get too comfortable though, or you may just have to make a trip to your expensive recovery centre like I did.

Lastly, thanks to Disklabs who (eventually) recovered my drive and saved this chap from digital oblivion...

Thanks for reading, Richard :)

Richard Costin Photography

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