Mark dishes out the kind of abuse that only the G Drive ev ATC can take
G-Technology is a division of HGST, the artist formerly known as Hitachi Global Storage Technologies, so that the fact it's making imaginative use of hard drives isn’t much of a revelation.
The G Drive ev ATC is actually one of its existing products, the G Drive ev RaW USB hard drive nestling inside a new and super-abuse-resistant plastic ‘ATC’ casing. That’s an abbreviation for ‘All-Terrain Case’, and it lives up to that title by protecting the 1TB disk inside from pressure, shock, dust and even immersion in water. What G-Technology doesn’t say is how deep it will go, but seeing as the unit floats, hopefully that won’t be an issue.
The other advantage of this casing is that it has its own integrated cable (USB 3.0 in this case), so you don’t need to carry one with it. G-Technology does provide a separate one if you want to use the ev RAW outside the ATC case. Because of that, I’d suggest you leave it in the case, although that does make the drive much larger than normal.
One oddity that I experienced testing the drive was that initially it wasn’t recognised by my PC. Eventually I worked out that G-Technology decided to format the drive by default for the Apple Mac, in an act of hubris that blew my mind.
Most Apple Macs would recognise a PC partition, but the PC (with 97.5% of the market share) has no idea what to do with the Mac OS partition.
For those with Apple Macs, you can get this exact drive with the Thunderbolt interface for an additional £40, although it won’t go any quicker, in case you optimistically assumed it would. In my testing, the 1TB disk achieved 138.3 MB/s reads and 125.4 MB/s writes. That’s well within the bandwidth limits of USB 3.0, so a Thunderbolt connected unit would equally limited by the raw physical drive performance.
The only means to actually leverage the bandwidth in either interface option is to use the firm's ev SSD product, which costs a numbing £424.80 for the 512GB model.
Those numbers hint at the critical point at which I stopped admiring the engineering skills and started counting the cost, because however you dress this up, this external drive is at least triple what you’d reasonably expect to pay for a 1TB external drive from another reputable brand. And in the real world, Transcend makes a 2TB drive rated with militarygrade shock resistance that is nearly half this price.
It’s also limiting that only the G Drive ev RaW drives will fit inside the ATC case, and G-Technology doesn’t sell it separately for those who already own one.
While I like G-Technology’s engineering and concept, it needs to really consider the bigger market that won’t pay Apple pricing, no matter how nicely it’s presented. Mark Pickavance
A very expensive ruggedised external drive.