G-Speed Shuttle XL is a seriously robust RAID system
By Jim Bask
Review: If serious grunt and reliabilty in the storage stakes is what you need, we take a good look at G-Technology’s Thunderbolt 3 Shuttle XL RAID enclosure system.
If there’s one thing that you cannot escape from when working with video, it’s the issue of storage. Higher resolutions and bitrates have meant increased demand on our storage requirements. Not just that but we also require fast storage. Very fast storage.
SSD drives are an obvious contender for this, but as we all know, they can be hugely expensive in the sort of capacities you need working with uncompressed or extremely high resolution video. Especially if you want them in a RAID configuration. But if you are thinking about having a truly robust and reliable disk array, spanning, say 6-8 drives or so, then you probably should consider traditional HDDs for the purpose.
Here’s where the G-Technology G-Speed Shuttle XL with EV series bay adaptors comes in. The G-Speed Shuttle has been available for a good while now with Thunderbolt 2, but now it is also being supplied with Thunderbolt 3 connectivity.
The system has a total of 8 hard drive bays with capacities from 24TB through to 72TB. Our sample came with 24TB of space via 6 drives. The EV Series bay adaptors are a really great workflow addition to the system, which I’ll go into a bit later.
It’s tough
The G-Speed Shuttle XL housing itself is a tough looking beast. It feels as safe as a brick house, while a nicely moulded in top handle allows it to be carried from place to place. Make no mistake, this isn’t a portable drive system designed to go alongside your computer in Star Bucks. But for moving from shooting location to edit suite it will work nicely, and is reassuringly robust feeling….[continue reading]