I have many external hard drives. Used them to backup and store my photography, design work all my files from my previous life as publisher of kontaktmag. Some of my external drives are over 5 years old. That’s pretty old in hard drive time. Until recently, all my hard drives have been LaCie drives. I started out with their regular line but then bought some new ones when they teamed up with Porsche Design and Red Dot Design winner Neil Poulton. They have proven to be very reliable as I don’t think one drive has gone bad on me. I wish I could say the same for my internal drives in my various computers I’ve had over the years. You could say I’m a very satisfied LaCie customer.
So, you might have noticed I wrote until recently, which implies I have made a change. In fact, I have. I had my photos scattered across many drives and some of them weren’t even backed up (this is a big no-no). Late last year I started using Lightroom to process and catalog my photos. I spent the holidays consolidating and organizing all of my digital photos. When I started looking for a new drive to put it all on, I started looking at LaCie. I was looking for something small enough to be portable, but also with plenty of space (1TB+).
I started looking at less expensive drives but then decided this was not the place to skimp. A friend has a small G-Drive that he loved so I started looking into G-Technology drives. They were similarly priced to LaCie and had a very nice form-factor. I started getting more interested when I found the G-RAID mini, which was a portable drive with built in RAID for seamless mirrored backup. So I bought one.
Then, I found a video on YouTube of Chase Jarvis showing his workflow. When I saw the G-Safe drive, I knew that I was going to go G-Technology moving forward. The G-Safe drive is actually two RAID 1 (mirrored) drives that can be swapped out when full or if one of the drives fails.
I can’t say that Chase Jarvis touting the drives hurt their cause any. I’m not a fanboy but this guy is a hardcore user, so if he likes them enough to trust his workflow to them, I think I can trust them, too.