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G-TECH SHUTTLE XL USER REVIEW
G-TECH SHUTTLE XL Now the Thunderbolt 3 connection has started to populate studios, we look at G-Technology’s popular Shuttle XL with ‘3’ on board WORDS ADAM GARSTONE
-Technology has long been a favourite here at Definition
Towers. Its various disk drive offerings
combine great build quality and reliability with value for money and reasonable – if not blistering – speed. The company has recently updated some of its existing product line to Thunderbolt 3, in line with the latest Macs from Apple, so we thought we would have a look at the top-of-the-line G-SPEED Shuttle XL. The review unit included six 8TB Enterprise-class (‘Beam me up, Scotty’) disks, with the last two slots in the case fitted with G-Technology’s caddies for its excellent Evolution Series mobile drives. The Shuttle XL is extremely ruggedly built. The case is made of high-density black plastic, with a sturdy carrying handle integrated into the top – worthwhile as the unit weighs over 10kg. There are generous cooling fans in the rear, along with an IEC mains power inlet (a single PSU – no redundancy here) and the two Thunderbolt 3 sockets. The front of the unit has a perforated, hinge- down front panel, behind which sit
RAID 5 is generally disparaged for modern, large disks. In the past, RAID 5 was fantastic – it didn’t lose you too much of your disk capacity to make the array tolerant to a single disk failing, and the speed was pretty good, too. Unfortunately, the size of modern disks brings a problem – I’ll go through the maths in the next paragraph or two. If you aren’t interested then please skip ahead, but just remember that if you leave the Shuttle XL in RAID 5 mode, and a drive fails, then you stand a good chance of losing all your data. THE MATHS The reason for this lies in the maths of rebuilding a disk array. RAID 5 allows one drive to fail and the array will keep working – yay! But at this point you have no redundancy at all – if another drive fails you will lose all your data. So you replace the faulty disk, and the clever
the eight drive locations (the unit is available with all eight populated with hard disks, if the mobile disk slots aren’t of interest to you). Capacities are available from 24TB to 72TB with the slots, and 32TB to 96TB fully populated with drives. G-Technology is always generous with cables, and in this case the Shuttle XL comes with UK and European mains leads as well as a Thunderbolt 3 cable. The unit comes pre-configured as RAID 5, which is a bit odd as
ABOVE Now with two Thunderbolt 3 sockets, the eight- bay Shuttle XL.
THE SHUTTLE XL COMES WITH UK AND EUROPEAN MAINS LEADS
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JUNE 2018 DEFINITION
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