G-Technology's 4TB G-SPEED eS 4-BAY RAID Array with four 1TB Enterprise Drives and PCIe Controller is an economical, high-performance, high-storage solution designed for professional video content creators. The compact and whisper-quiet G-SPEED eS sports a 3Gbit eSATA interface great for transmitting the large amounts of data demanded by video files. It also features four Enterprise-quality 1TB hot- swappable Hitachi Ultrastar 7200 RPM SATA drives. The drives have the memory you need to store video and to speedily and easily access it for streaming.
Included with the enclosure is G-Technology's PCIe 4x RAID controller, an essential component for getting the most from your G-SPEED eS. With it, you will have a great variety of RAID options. The controller allows you to configure your G-SPEED eS as a RAID 0,1,5,10 or JBOD. As such, you have wide flexibility in choosing the right configuration for your work, whether you need more storage, extra reliability, simultaneous access to video files, or some ratio between the three. It supports multi-stream SD, ProRes 422, and uncompressed HD workflows. For example, a single G-SPEED eS used with the G-Tech controller supports up to four simultaneous streams of ProRes422 HQ or one stream of uncompressed 1080/60i. Moreover, in terms of just storage capacity, one terabyte of memory holds up to 84 hours of HDV 1080i, 17 hours of DVCPRO HD 1080/60i, 13 Hours of 8 bit SD, 10 hours of ProRes 422HQ, 10 hours of 10 bit SD, and 2.25 hours of HD 1080/60i.
With the controller, you can setup your RAID configurations and monitor your system via an easy-to-use, web-based graphic user interface. Accessed via any internet browser on your computer, this simple GUI can easily keep track of your RAID's performance and, in the event of a disk failure, have the G-SPEED eS alert you via email.
Along with this safety mechanism, the G-SPEED eS features locks for each drive, a sturdy aluminum casing, and two internal fans for preventing the hard drives from overheating. In addition, the G-SPEED, itself, will sound audible alarms in case a disc fails, the internal temperature nears 140°F, a fan stops, a fan spins too slowly to cool the system, or when the enclosure is improperly disconnected from the G-Tech PCIe RAID controller.
Beyond all these exceptional features, should you ever decide 1TB of memory isn't enough, you also have the option of scaling up in a few different ways. You can replace all of the drives in the G-SPEED enclosure with 2TB drives (because you can't mix and match them) for 8TB per enclosure. You can also use the included four eSATA ports on the controller to connect up to four G-SPEED eS enclosures at once. That is to say, if you go for the maximum amount of scalable memory using the G-Tech controller, you can connect four enclosures of 8TB apiece for a total of 32TB of memory!
All told, the 4TB G-SPEED eS with the G-Tech PCIe controller is the total package you need for an economical, high-storage, high-performance RAID hard-drive array.