Field Test: A New Look at G-Tech’s EV Dock, Single Port RED Download Station
By Jim Bask
From Charles Haine
The G-Dock EV is a dual-slot drive caddy that can serve many different purposes depending on your production. When first released two years ago, many reviewers were frustrated by the slow speeds offered by using traditional hard drives for the system. Now that SSD prices have come down significantly amount, we took another look at the G-Dock EV as an option for filmmakers who want to spend less of their work day waiting on downloads.
Design
The G-Dock EV has the same silver design that G-Tech has been using nearly a decade, matching the look and feel of the old Mac Pros. It’s aged remarkably well, and still feels acceptably modern despite the age.
The SSD disks use the newer design language of G-Tech, black and blues but with similar milling for vent holes, and they match together well. The build quality is strong and seems likely to survive frequent on-set use in a variety of situations. The built-in fan is a nice bonus, and the buttons for ejecting drives are large and clear. They are occasionally a bit hard to push to get the drive to eject, but that seems safer than having them eject too easily. When you do get the drive out, it comes out smoothly. The rear button is a power toggle, not a switch, and it’s easy to forget about. More than once in our testing, we pushed in a drive and assumed it would automatically mount, but of course you have to turn the unit on as well.