DEFINITION June 2018

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USER REVIEW G-TECH SHUTTLE XL

being limited by the disks rather than the interface. RAID 0 was, unsurprisingly, the fastest, with writes at over 1.2GB/s and reads well over 1GB/s. RAID 5 slowed down reads to about 900MB/s, and the drive hit around 800MB/s for RAID 6, both with marginally slower write speeds of about 1.1GB/s. In a small, boutique post- production environment, or perhaps in a DIT set-up, the inclusion of the Evolution mobile disk slots makes the transfer of rushes much cleaner. With a fleet of the mobile drives ferrying footage back and forth, slotting the drive into the unit and setting off a copy is much simpler than having flying USB leads – well, flying about. The G-Technology G-SPEED Shuttle XL starts at just over £1900 plus VAT for the 24TB drive with two ev Series Bay Adapters, to just over £7600 plus VAT for the 96TB, eight- drive version.

would format it as RAID 6, but in a small edit or grading suite, where re-importing the footage is always an option if something goes wrong, I would probably use RAID 0, for the extra storage space and speed. Fortunately, the application you use to configure and control the Shuttle XL is generally an excellent app – providing a simple set-up of RAID level, monitoring of both the runtime and NVRAM logs, system voltages and temperatures, and so on. The Shuttle will work with a Mac without the G-Tech driver being installed, but don’t do it – amongst other things you’ll have problems with the Mac sleeping (it crashes without the driver installed). SPEEDS There wasn’t a great deal of difference in performance between the Thunderbolt 3 version and the old Thunderbolt 2 version – the speed

RAID controller rebuilds the array. To do this it must read all the data from the surviving disks (five in the six-disk review unit). Although these are Enterprise-class (‘Fire photon torpedoes’) disks, they still have a non-recoverable error rate of 1 in 1015. To rebuild the array, the controller must read about 3.5x1014 bits from the surviving disks, so you stand around a one-in-three chance of getting an unrecoverable error, the rebuild failing, and losing all data. The situation is worse, of course, if you have an eight-disk array, but at least G-Technology ships the units with those Enterprise-class drives (‘Ahead, warp…’ OK, I’ll stop with the Star Trek references now). With error rates ten times worse, consumer class drives are pretty much guaranteed to fail in this scenario. If I was using the Shuttle XL in a data-critical application, perhaps as on-set storage for a DIT, then I

THE SITUATION IS WORSE, OF COURSE, IF YOU HAVE AN EIGHT-DISK ARRAY

ABOVE Does the includion of Thunderbolt 3 turn the Shuttle XL into a speed machine?

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