The LaCie Rugged SSD Pro external drive is designed for professional videographers and others who work in the field with Thunderbolt 3-equipped computers (most often Macs). Small, light, and even mailable, it earns the right to add “extremely” in front of “fast and rugged.”

The Rugged SSD Pro’s speed and toughness are pretty much tied for being its most impressive feature. For the first, it marries a Seagate FireCuda NVMe SSD with a Thunderbolt 3 interface. LaCie rates the combination at 2,800MBps for both disk reads and writes, compared with the 2,800MBps for reads and 2,300MBps for writes claimed for the Samsung Portable SSD X5—another SSD that combines NVMe with Thunderbolt 3, and the only other drive we’ve tested to date with similar performance. The two were virtually tied in our tests, leaving everything else in the dust. Together, they effectively redefine what fast means for an external drive. 

The Rugged SSD Pro offers one USB Type-C port and comes with a single USB-C-to-USB-C cable. However, the port and cable support both Thunderbolt 3 and—to some extent at least—USB 3.1 Gen 1 and Gen 2 ports, which isn’t always true for Thunderbolt 3 drives, including the Samsung Portable SSD X5 in particular. This can be critical if you want to take advantage of Thunderbolt 3 speeds in the field and then send the drive to someone who may have a PC with USB 3.1 ports.

PCMag.com

Check out the full article HERE to learn more

Learn more about LaCie HERE

t’s been a little while since we’ve seen their gear in the lab, but we’ve known the G-Technology team at this point for a decade or longer. G-Technology is a division of Western Digital, and is known for their RAID enclosures, hard drives and SSDs designed specifically for the discerning creative professional. As needs change and performance becomes paramount for this audience, G-Technology SSDs stand out from the crowd, delivering industry leading solutions for use in both the field and the office. In this joint review, we take a look at three of the leading G-Technology SSD solutions, quickly catching up on this portion of the WD portfolio designed to address the needs of the high-end content creator audience.

We also have a video overview of the family with a complete teardown of the desktop SSD unit.

G-Technology G-DRIVE Mobile SSD

The G-DRIVE Mobile SSD is a rugged portable SSD that comes in capacities up to 2TB and offers reliable performance. Tough both inside and out this drive features a protective aluminum core to prevent overheating and maintain performance and it leverages SSD technology for added shock and vibration resistance. Additionally, this drive has been designed with IP67 water/dust resistance, 1000 lbs crush resistance, and 3-meter drop protection. Connectivity wise, it features a USB-C port with a USB 3.1 Gen 2 interface and comes with a USB 3.0/2.0 cable adapter for backwards compatibility. Weighing in at just 86 grams is the smallest and lightest in the G-DRIVE SSD family.

Check out the full article at storagereview.com HERE.

Learn more about G-Technology HERE

A year or so ago, I invested more than $2,000 in an 8-bay, 24 terabyte RAID system — which included a handle for portability. My G-Speed Shuttle XL is a great piece of kit, but you need a pack mule if you’re going to take it into the field.

Now the Glyph comes along and — though it’s not exactly a fair comparison (RAID 5 vs. RAID 0, hard drives vs. SSDs, 24 terabytes vs… ummm… two), the Glyph’s performance comes closer to the big boy than you might imagine and is ideal for people like me who need to edit a single large project under extreme deadline pressure in the field — and carry everything themselves.

The Glyph is smaller than my wallet.

I am NOT giving this back.

As a video editor, I’m regularly looking for a good portable hard drive that can serve a couple different purposes. Some I’m looking to box up and mail across the country to different marketing firms or editing companies, others I’m looking to carry with me when I have to leave the office but still need immediate and fast access to in-progress projects. In recent years, I’ve leaned heavily on different LaCie Rugged drives for both these tasks, but a new drive from G-Tech has taken over the latter task: The G-Drive Mobile SSD. With 500GB of SSD speeds through a USB-C connection, this little guy is so small it fits into a jacket pocket, but usually has enough storage capacity to handle whole video projects and allow me to work on them remotely directly into my MacBook Pro. I say that like it’s a rare experience and, unfortunately, it kind of is.

Recently I flew to Las Vegas for a tradeshow, WPPI, but I was also in the process of working on a testimonial project for a tech company here in San Francisco. Not sure if I would need to tweak the project while I was out for a week, I opted to transfer the whole thing to the G-Drive Mobile. For video, I need something that can handle the data transfer speeds necessary to not get frustrated, even when I’m working with proxy files. In this specific case, I was toting around the original files in full 4K because we were so close to exporting a finished project, so having a high speed drive on hand was even more important.

As a note, I have several drives that would have worked for this project, except most weren’t USB-C compatible, and none of them were Thunderbolt 3 compatible that had this much capacity. Given that my mobile workstation is a 2017 MacBook Pro, having something fast, with a lot of storage capacity, that also connects directly to my computer was what I was primarily looking for (no #donglelife)…read more

From digitalphotopro.com

At some point in the relatively-near future, the traditional hard drive-comprised of spinning platters of magnetic material will disappear from the marketplace. The fragility of conventional drives is offset by the low cost of production, but as solid-state memory drops in price, the cost benefits of sticking with a large, delicate recording device in computers will disappear and Solid State Drive (SSD) hard drives will become the norm. The G|Drive mobile SSD is an indication of the shape (and size) of things to come.

Already, computers like the iMac Pro have ditched the hard drive in favor of the SSD, using the extra space gained in the swap to add more high-power processing. Laptops are almost universally SSD-driven, and the primary remaining use of traditional drives is in high-capacity storage where fast speeds aren’t necessary, and the price is a primary concern.

The benefits of SSD drives are twofold; the chip-based storage offers both high speed, and small size. The G-Technology G|Drive mobile SSD is a perfect example of how this storage transition will change how photographers and videographers work.

G|Drive mobile SSD

The G|Drive mobile SSD is smaller than the Apple mouse I’m using while writing this review, smaller in every dimension. I can put the G|Drive mobile SSD in my pocket, and it feels less cumbersome than my wallet….[continue reading]

“…The best part about the new Wireless SSD? You won’t be needing your laptop to backup your photos and/or videos. Weighing in at only 1 lb, you probably won’t even feel the storage device in your camera bag. If you’re a landscape photographer like me, this could be extremely useful. Especially while spending a few days in the backcountry hiking and taking pictures, I sometimes find myself becoming more cautious about protecting my images. I’ve had my camera ruined on a mountaintop before, causing me to lose my images from the day. It certainly would’ve been nice to backup the photos in order to preserve those precious moments, and potentially have a product to sell to my audience.

If you decide this is something you might buy, it’d be wise to compare the My Passport Wireless SSD to similar products, such as the Gnarbox. The backup device was released a few months before the Passport Wireless, but has a few differences. For starters, the Gnarbox’s batter life ranges only from 4-6 hours. However, the Gnarbox is also shock resistant, and you won’t need third-party apps to edit imported content. With two sizes: 128GB + 64GB microSD ($299.00) and the 256GB + 64 GB microSD ($399.00), the Gnarbox is a bit pricier than the My Passport Wireless SSD, but also provides smaller storage sizes….” [continue reading]

The world’s population is going mobile, according to the number of portable drives by different companies announced at CES 2018: Sandisk, Seagate, Patriot, Dell and Western Digital are some of the names involved.

…We pick some of the SSD and HDD solutions announced at CES 2018 or close to the event, for this 2018 guide.

One note before we continue: this guide does not intend to be a complete guide to what the market offers. It is based on a series of new products announced at CES this year and is a good starting point to explore – some of – what is available or will be available in 2018. We included some HDD solutions that may interest readers, but SSDs, as prices come down and speed goes up, seem to be the way forward…

• LaCie Rugged Secure
• Seagate Fast SSD
• G-Technology 2TB G-DRIVE R-Series SSD (featuring a versatile USB-C port with a USB 3.1 Gen 2 interface, so the device is ready for laptops both old and new.)
• Patriot EVLVR Thunderbolt 3 Portable SSD
• Dell Portable Thunderbolt 3 SSD
• Toshiba XS700
• Plugable Thunderbolt 3 SSD
• Transcend StoreJet 25M3
• Seagate Joy Drive

….[continue reading full article]

Sony’s new G Series Professional SSDs, however, are specifically designed for just that kind of scenario, according to Engadget. The company claims that the new drives can ensure stable 4K video recording without frame drops, even after the SDDs have been subjected to multiple rewrites…[continue reading] 

Sony has unveiled a new range of SSDs designed specifically with external video recorders in mind. The Sony SSD G Series drives claim to be more durable and reliable.

Recognising the large user base in the external recorder market, Sony has announced a new line of SSDs with this kind of shooter in mind. The new Sony SSD G Series Drives will be available in capacities of 960GB and 460GB, and will feature a range of features that make them ideal for use as media for external recorders such as the Atomos Shogun Inferno or the Convergent Design Odyssey7Q+.

Perhaps the most attractive of these features is their longevity. As per the video above, Sony estimates the average SSD offers around 300 TBW (or Terabytes Written throughout their life cycle). In contrast, the smaller of the two new Sony SSD G Series Drives will offer 1200 TBW, with the larger version claiming twice as much at 2400 TBW. With an average usage of fully writing and formatting the drive 5 times per week, this adds up to about ten years of usable lifetime for this drive. Nice!…[continue reading]