G-Technology G-DRIVE Professional External Hard Drive 2TB (Gen5, USB 3.0/FireWire 800) (0G02529)

After reading the reports of the mounting problems with this drive I called G-Tech support before getting started with my new drive. The support was great! The support guy I deal with stayed on the phone while I confirmed that my drive wasn't one of the drives that has issues. So here's the scoop. When you first use the drive mount it and eject it with both Firewire and USB 3.0. If the drive mounts and ejects with both connections you are good to go. If not call G-Tech support for an update. The affected drives were limited to a batch that sold mostly in the fall of 2012. While I guess their is a chance you may still get one of those drives I would assume your chances are fairly slim. On a side note. The only issues I have ever had with a G-Drive was while doing a Time Machine backup with Mountain Lion (10.8.4). The problem was with OSX corrupting the G-Drive directory after the Time Machine backup, not a G-Tech issue.

This is my second G-Drive and I don't know why there are so many bad reviews. I think all the happy customers are too busy doing productive professional photography, video, music, etc. work on their G-Drives and the only customers who have problems are writing all the reviews. I use this with the FireWire 800 cable with my late 2011 MacBook Pro. This is my main back up drive used with Time Machine. A must have for Macs without USB 3.0. Thunderbolt is great too, but the compatible external hard drives are too expensive. I also daisy-chain (plug one into another) this G-Drive with my G-Drive Mini since I only have one FW800 input on my MacBook Pro. Time Machine seamlessly and automatically backs up 3 of my hard drives on to this G-Drive. This G-Drive would also be great for external editing for video, music, photography, design, etc. This G-Drive costs a little more than regular hard drives, but the quality is excellent, it looks very professional, and it comes with both FireWire and USB 3.0 cables. And it's very fast. Always have a back up hard drive, and have more than one back up if your work is important. All hard drives fail eventually.

The drive arrived in good shape. Well packed and all cords needed to connect the drive were included. The drive is quiet and backing up to it is fast and painless. I recently had a drive failure on my iMac and I was depending on the Time machine backup to allow a full restore. Apparently, the failure in the drive was bad enough that it corrupted the files on my time machine backup. After 12 hours of trying to mount the time machine backup I decided I needed a more reliable solution to the issue. I chose this product to serve as that solution. I recommend this device for anyone who needs a reliable backup drive.

I love 4TB in that size, all with it's firewire 800 ports and USB 3.0, its fast and silent, solid hard aluminum construction, i use it form my daily workflow and works great in firewire 800, mi computer doesn't have USB 3.0, so i love it came with 2 Firewire 800 ports, perfect to work with Photoshop and Final Cut. some times the light keeps blinking wile it's not reading or active at all, but other than that it works great.

Sometimes its a little slow when switching from G-Drive to iMac to another and back to G-Drive. Another thing that I'm having problems with is dropping a file from the G-Drive to compressor (.mov) to make compression changes, I get an error message from Compresson...however, when I take the same file from the G-Drive, place it on my desktop, THEN drop into compressor, compressor works fine. With all that said, I plugged it in out of the box to my iMac (osx) and it functioned just fine!

This drive failed to successfully complete a Time Machine backup without an error. Forced unmounting and a power cycle would remedy the problem, but who wants to do that every time they want to back up their data? Drive was returned to G-Tech as defective after only 1 week. I researched the problem online and discovered it was somewhat common, though I found no real remedy. Hoping my new drive from G-Tech doesn't behave the same way, as they offer no money back under warranty, only further purchases of their products. UPDATE #1: Received my replacement drive from G-Tech (Note: You have to pay return shipping). My new drive exhibited the same behavior as the first. It successfully performed 2 or 3 hourly Time Machine backups, then failed. Bad news. Not happy :-( If you are intending to use this drive with Time Machine, I cannot recommend it. Now I'm going to be stuck footing two return shipping payments. G-Tech has hundreds of my dollars, and I have a useless product. UPDATE #2: I received a phone call directly from the manufacturer to let me know the firmware update was available. That was a pleasant and unexpected surprise. I installed the new firmware, and the drive still fails to backup data via Time Machine over FW800. It behaves exactly as before. It successfully creates 2 or 3 hourly backups, but then fails and has to be unmounted and restarted in order to get it working again. It then requires a restart every 2 or 3 hours. Not worth it. This has been a very disappointing purchase.

I love the G-Drive series! This is my second one, my first (which I have had for 3 years) has been dropped a few times & ruffed up a little, but it still works strong. So I wanted to get a bigger drive & I cheaped out and got a cheaper model & I paid the price with cheap construction. So I bought this drive to replace that cheaper drive & I will keep buying the G-Drives as they are sturdy power~horses!

.. After one month, it broke down. And it wasn't mishandled or dropped. When it did work, very beefy and strong. The customer service process was very easy however I think its a drag that they charge you for sending a device back that was faulty within the first month. This kind of penny pinching mentality ends up biting companies who are confident to standy by their products. Also, they stated that even though it broke down so quickly, they wouldn't be sending a new device. Instead, it will be a refurbished one. Again, if its a new piece of equipment they should write off these bad apples and great the customer as king. .. So maybe the device is good yet the company is cheap

Very good

I bought this to be my external backup drive. For Mac users this was my time capsule. I have been using this for only 6 months. It it has failed utterly and all the data is irretrievably lost. This is the second worst catastrophic failure of a backup drive I have ever experienced. I transferred time capsule data from a smaller drive onto this one so I have just lost two years worth of backup. Odd that it happened the day after I upgraded my OS to Yosemite. I have internal backup drives that are mirrors of the drives I use so I am OK but I am very disappointed with Hitachi for producing such a worthless drive. For the record both Apple's Disk Utility and Disk Warrior see the drive and both claim it is beyond repair. As far as these utilities are concerned there is no data on the only partition.

Pros: Quiet operation, simple set up, and very fast. Cons: Light on Front is too bright, had to put electrical tape over front.