Camera Labs

Hi guys!

It's finally here. My new laptop and I was thinking to ditch the approach of having Lightroom and iTunes spamming up my internal hard disk. Instead I decided to take this approach.

G Raid Mini for my iTunes library, 1TB will do me nicely in Raid1. For the video/picture drive I thought about the G Safe or another G Raid mini to safe the data on there.

In addition to that I get another G Raid Mini for being out and about and to save temporary work. This could be photos shot on location. A 256GB SSD from LaCie could do the job as well.

Now after chatting away here my question. Has anyone G Tech products and can tell me something about the quality of the components used and their service? Very important factors for me to be honest as I appreciate competent people. Your help from whoever could advise is hugely appreciated.


After checking I will be getting a G Raid Mini for oot and aboot and a G Safe for home use.

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http://ishootnikon.wordpress.com

I have a G Raid Mini 1.5tb set up in Raid 1 which gives me 750gb of usable space. I have been VERY impressed with the product. The build quality is very good, data transfers are quick thanks to firewire/e-sata connectivity and all of this is in an extremely portable package. I have trusted this Raid with all of my 30,000 and hours of videos. The only thing I will say is that disconnecting this drive from the computer is a little annoying. On mac you have to go into the disc utility unmount the device and eject the discs. I did contact customer service on one occasion and they responded within a day with a very informative response. Overall though definitely a good buy

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Camera: Canon 550D with battery grip
Lenses: Canon 24-105mm f/4L, Canon 50mm f1.4, Canon 18-55mm, Tamron 70-300mm,
Accessories: Manfrotto 055XPROB with 808RC4 head, Canon 430ex II speedlite, Lowepro Nova 180AW and Lowepro Pro Runner 450AW

Oh that is so lame, every hot girl who can aim a camera thinks she’s a photographer -Stewie Griffin

Hi James,

thanks for the information. Sounds like the G Raid Mini is the perfect partner for being away from the regular desktop environment. Thanks for letting me know! You definitely helped me a lot in making the best decision.

Do you work off the device in Lightroom etc. or is it just a data grave? if the speed was fast enough to work with data on that Raid live it would be bought immediately.

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http://ishootnikon.wordpress.com

I don't use Lightroom so can not comment on how it will work with that. Although if you are talking about the Library function of it I doubt it will work. I have tried using the iPhoto library with my G-Raid Mini but you have to have all the photos imported into the program which requires them to be on the hard drive.

What I normally do is edit all my pictures using Photoshop whilst they are on my internal SSD. Then when I have finished I move them across to the G-Raid for storage. I am pretty sure you would be able to store them on the G-Raid and then open them in photoshop, edit them and save them back onto the G-Raid. The same would be for Lightroom although I am not sure if you have to have photos in the Library to edit them or if you can open a file in Lightroom and then save it in another location.

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Camera: Canon 550D with battery grip
Lenses: Canon 24-105mm f/4L, Canon 50mm f1.4, Canon 18-55mm, Tamron 70-300mm,
Accessories: Manfrotto 055XPROB with 808RC4 head, Canon 430ex II speedlite, Lowepro Nova 180AW and Lowepro Pro Runner 450AW

Oh that is so lame, every hot girl who can aim a camera thinks she’s a photographer -Stewie Griffin

Hey yes Lightroom can handle a catalogue on a different drive. If it was fast enough then that'd be ideal. Would outsource the iTunes and Lightroom data to external drives. Maybe the G Speed Q would be ideal for both. Plus the G Raid mini.

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http://ishootnikon.wordpress.com

Do you mean Lightroom can store photos in it's library that are on an external drive? That would be pretty cool

I was also thinking of getting a larger Raid such as the G Speed. Although I've got my eye on a Pegasus which can use Apple's thunderbolt technology. Waiting for thunderbolt accessories to come down in price though. Having a large storage space at home (4 or 8tb) would be pretty good. Then on the G-Raid I would carry around photos/videos that I am currently working and things like my business portfolio. I'm a little conscious at the moment that all my photos are on that small Raid. I'm confident the Raid won't break but if I loose it!

The G-Raid mini is pretty fast when connected through Firewire 800 (haven't tried e-sata but would imagine that would be faster) and is probably as fast as a normal 7200rpm hard drive. If you got the G Speed that would definitely be faster if you set it up in Raid 5 (my favourite). What laptop do you currently have? If it's anything mac with a thunderbolt port you might want to consider looking at a thunderbolt drive for you large home storage as that is seriously quick. A 4 drive pegasus set up in Raid 5 would be faster than my internal Crucial m4 SSD

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Camera: Canon 550D with battery grip
Lenses: Canon 24-105mm f/4L, Canon 50mm f1.4, Canon 18-55mm, Tamron 70-300mm,
Accessories: Manfrotto 055XPROB with 808RC4 head, Canon 430ex II speedlite, Lowepro Nova 180AW and Lowepro Pro Runner 450AW

Oh that is so lame, every hot girl who can aim a camera thinks she’s a photographer -Stewie Griffin

I have an older 2TB Seagate drive that was constantly on the fritz when running under Windows, but since getting my MBP it's been well-behaved. Since shooting weddings is such high-volume work I didn't want to get my primary MBP HDD bogged down with tens of thousands of RAW files, so I've recently moved them all to the USB 2.0 Seagate external via the Lightroom Library module. Since Lightroom needs only to access the files to render previews or to export, this setup works perfectly and I'm in the process of migrating all of my RAWs to external drives now to free up space on my onboard HDD.

FW800/Thunderbolt/eSATA would be wonderful for file transfers, but really once the data is on the external drives, the throughput of those interfaces doesn't really matter (at least in my experience thus far) when you're doing your editing.

That said, transfering ~32GB worth of photos every Saturday via USB 2.0 is getting old, so I'm in the market for some high-capacity Thunderbolt drives...

Can't wait for the iMac refresh with USB 3.0 AND T-bolt

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Canon EOS 5D MkII | Canon EOS 7D | Canon Digital Rebel XSi | EF 35mm f/1.4L | EF 50mm f/1.8 II | EF 85mm f/1.8 | EF 100mm f/2.8 Macro USM | EF 135mm f/2L | EF-S 18-55mm f/3.5-5.6 IS | 580EX II | LumoPro LP-120

My Flickr

Yep agree and some fast storage would be great as i intend to work off the external drive. The Pegasus would be for me a solution for storing photos, videos and music alongside my documents. Still fancy the G Tech products.

Will check more closely on that one.

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http://ishootnikon.wordpress.com

Anything with Firewire 800 or e-Sata is going to be pretty quick. The price difference between USB 2.0 drives/raids and Firewire 800/e-Sata drives/raids is not very big and it is probably worth the extra money for the faster performance. G-tech make very nice products in my experience. I found out about the company in the Apple store who sell their drives. If it's good enough to be in the apple store it must be pretty good

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Camera: Canon 550D with battery grip
Lenses: Canon 24-105mm f/4L, Canon 50mm f1.4, Canon 18-55mm, Tamron 70-300mm,
Accessories: Manfrotto 055XPROB with 808RC4 head, Canon 430ex II speedlite, Lowepro Nova 180AW and Lowepro Pro Runner 450AW

Oh that is so lame, every hot girl who can aim a camera thinks she’s a photographer -Stewie Griffin

A tiny problem in my opinion with most of they drive solutions is that you can't replace the drives yourself. It voids the warranty And handing over my data to some people is a bit of an issue if I'm honest. Still evaluating the options.

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http://ishootnikon.wordpress.com

Yer that is one of the issues. I'm confident enough with the reliability of the drive though. I am not sure that is the case with the G-Safe as the drives can be easily removed from the front so would imagine they are user changeable. On the G-Raid mini the drives are built in so it has to be sent back to the repair centre. Although when you think about most small portable drives they are often surrounded by a casing and I would imagine they too have to be sent back if there is a problem. It's only on higher end raids that the user gets easy access to the drives

_________________
Camera: Canon 550D with battery grip
Lenses: Canon 24-105mm f/4L, Canon 50mm f1.4, Canon 18-55mm, Tamron 70-300mm,
Accessories: Manfrotto 055XPROB with 808RC4 head, Canon 430ex II speedlite, Lowepro Nova 180AW and Lowepro Pro Runner 450AW

Oh that is so lame, every hot girl who can aim a camera thinks she’s a photographer -Stewie Griffin