User Poll: G Tech V.S. LaCie

[Walter Biscardi]

First off, every drive manufacturer has failures. I’ve owned products from 6 different drive manufacturers and every one of them has had at least one failure in my shop since 2001.

I liked G-TECH until they came out with their new G2 models. I brought in a G-1000(2) into the shop about 6 months ago and as long as it’s running by itself, it was plenty fast. Daisy chain any other drives through it and it slowed down completely. The older model G-Tech’s don’t do that, nor do any other FW800 drive that we own.

We run both the LaCie SATA’s and FW800 units and they’ve been solid. In fact I’ve had LaCie’s for over 4 years now and haven’t lost a project due to an issue with them.

We’re probably going to switch to a Ciprico Fibre Channel solution for our primary storage very shortly, but the LaCie SATA’s will stay in the shop for our third room and backup.

Walter Biscardi, Jr.
https://www.biscardicreative.com
HD Editorial & Animation for Food Network’s “Good Eats”
HD Editorial for “Assignment Earth”

Read my blog! https://blogs.creativecow.net/WalterBiscardi

[Will Keir]

Walter,

Are the eSATA drives really that much faster than FW800? On LaCie’s site they boast 300MB/s on their eSATA II drive but G Tech has the same eSATA II ports but only boast 135MB/s, I am not really sure how that can be.

Also 300MB/s is faster than RAID 0 right? So one of these eSATA II drives is faster than a 2 disk RAID array? I’ve been looking into getting a RAID but if I can get the same speed from a single drive, if not faster (and I’m looking for speed), why mess around with a RAID?

Thanks in advance for your feed back,

Will Keir

[Walter Biscardi]

[Will Keir] “Are the eSATA drives really that much faster than FW800?”

Depends on the unit and how many drives you have in the box and how it’s set up. My 5 drive LaCie S2S gets about 220MB/s when it’s empty and averages just above/under 200MB/s as it starts filling up.

My G-RAID 500, averages about 55MB/s READ while my LaCie 2TB Too Big FW800 unit gets about 60MB/ read / write.

So yeah, SATA is generally much faster.

[Will Keir] “Also 300MB/s is faster than RAID 0 right?”

RAID 0 is a media array setting. 300MB/s is an array speed. Two completely different things.

[Will Keir] “I’ve been looking into getting a RAID but if I can get the same speed from a single drive, if not faster (and I’m looking for speed), why mess around with a RAID?”

A RAID is always faster than a single drive. The more drives in the RAID, the faster the speeds, in general.

Walter Biscardi, Jr.
https://www.biscardicreative.com
HD Editorial & Animation for Food Network’s “Good Eats”
HD Editorial for “Assignment Earth”

Read my blog! https://blogs.creativecow.net/WalterBiscardi

[Will Keir]

[walter biscardi] “My 5 drive LaCie S2S gets about 220MB/s”

Is this 5 disc setup a RAID or daisy chain?

[Walter Biscardi]

[Will Keir] “[walter biscardi] “My 5 drive LaCie S2S gets about 220MB/s”

Is this 5 disc setup a RAID or daisy chain?”

It’s a RAID unit, you can look it up at LaCie.com or at any reseller of LaCie. It’s a single box with 5 drives.

Walter Biscardi, Jr.
https://www.biscardicreative.com
HD Editorial & Animation for Food Network’s “Good Eats”
HD Editorial for “Assignment Earth”

Read my blog! https://blogs.creativecow.net/WalterBiscardi

[Shane Ross]

I have never owned a Lacie drive, so I cannot attest to them. I do have 3 G-Raids…the ORIGINAL G-Raids, and they are very good. I did have one of them fail, but the information on it was safe (it was not the drive, but something else) and it was repaired under warranty and the information was fine.

BUT…just like Walter, I bought a G-Raid 2 and saw the performance drop from 65MB/s down to 16MB/s.

Now I use CalDigit e-SATA drives. The S2VR Duo…and the Firewire VR.

Shane

Littlefrog Post
http://www.lfhd.net

[Mark Maness]

Here’s my take on this…

Anytime you use firewire, you have to think that I may lose any info that I have on the drive. I’ve lost drives with LaCie and G-Tech. I can’t answer why this is but it seems that everyone somewhere at sometime has had a firewire drive failure.

Every manufacturer out there can’t absolutely guarentee 100% that their drive won’t fail. Nobody can do this. BUT for some odd reason, it seems that SATA drives seem to be more reliable.

If you’re looking for absolute reliability, you’ll need two firewire drives. One to use, and one for daily backup. But that’s not very realistic. What I like to do is use an internal drive for all of my project files and necessaary components. Then you can use your firewire drive for media, because if your drive fails, replace it and recapture.

_______________________________

Wayne Carey
Schazam Productions
http://www.schazamproductions.com

[Walter Biscardi]

[Wayne Carey] “BUT for some odd reason, it seems that SATA drives seem to be more reliable.”

Not necessarily. I killed two CalDigit S2VR HD models and an array of S2VR Duo’s. I’ve also killed Fibre Channel arrays in the past. I haven’t found one form of storage necessarily more reliable than any other.

[Wayne Carey] “If you’re looking for absolute reliability, you’ll need two firewire drives. One to use, and one for daily backup. But that’s not very realistic.”

That’s an absolute MUST if you’re running RAID 0 and it absolutely is realistic. LaCie has a 2TB FW800 unit for under $600 now. No excuse not to have a complete backup of your work. This is the unit we use right now for our backups and it completely saved us when the CalDigit stuff went down.

Walter Biscardi, Jr.
https://www.biscardicreative.com
HD Editorial & Animation for Food Network’s “Good Eats”
HD Editorial for “Assignment Earth”

Read my blog! https://blogs.creativecow.net/WalterBiscardi

[Steve Cohen]

[Wayne Carey] “If you’re looking for absolute reliability, you’ll need two firewire drives. One to use, and one for daily backup. But that’s not very realistic. What I like to do is use an internal drive for all of my project files and necessaary components. Then you can use your firewire drive for media, because if your drive fails, replace it and recapture.”

I agree with everyone. I have lost both LaCie’s and G-Raid’s.

I do what wayne suggests above and it has saved me a couple of time.
I also back up the timeline and project files to and additional external drive incase my internal drive has issues.

The onlye thing I have found the be fairly reliable is the Raid 5 SAN that we are currently using. We have had a bout 3 or 4 drives og bad, but have never lost a piece of information.

Just replace the bad drive and let it rebuild itself.

Steve Cohen
Editor
O2 Media Inc.

[Chris Borjis]

Walter I’ve got the ciprico 4210 fibre channel array and love it.

It’s rated for everything up to RGB 4:4:4 from an SR deck.

It’s been quite the workhorse for me at work.

A great product to be sure.