This almost screams to me a G-Technology employee.

*sign*

Felix

This almost screams to me a G-Technology employee.

But I am not all that technical…not like Rob. I just edit and see how they work…and run the usual tests.

We’ll see.

The two biggest issues are two points in the actual enclosure design.

1. The front panel is basically ’sitting’ there without any secure connection to the top part of the enclosure. This will eventually cause a rattle from the horizontal vibrations from the cheap fan that has a CalDigit label slapped onto it. The top of the front panel should be screwed on to the inner tray panel.

2. The aluminum case (slipped over the drive tray like a sock and attached with the rubber feet) has the same issue. It is basically just sitting there without any connection to the drive trays. This is bad for cooling and again, is causing a rattle from the vertical vibrations of the drives. In a design like that the free sitting enclosure should at least be connected with a rubber square as seen in many 30-60$ aluminum enclosures.

The electronics and OS are fine although the front controls are really just a gimmick and are not really needed.

Editors: Unless you want to work with earplugs don’t buy them. The Vent is cheap and noisy. Compared to the G-Raid 3… No, the G-Tech products are in a completely different league. This is a very poorly designed Raid that looks flashy, is a disaster under the hood and will be guarantied trouble.

Sure wish they’d have put in Sata. This is just too slow these days.

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They, CalDigit, did put in eSATA. Quadruple interface at speeds up to 220MB/s when connected to the internal eSATA port on new Mac Pro machines.

They offer hardware raid in O, 1 and JBOD by turning a small dial in the back of the unit. I decided to use the drive as level 1 for safety. I set it up and it worked quickly and everything appeared fine. Well part of using Level 1 for me is the security of removing the tray mounted drives and separating them for security (Fire, theft, etc).

Well one day I fired it up and created one small 3 to 5mb comp when I realized I forgot to put the mirrored drive in the unit. So I tried to figure out what would happen in this situation by looking at the documentation, but there was only a photocopied instruction sheet on how to set up the drive, not what to do if something happened, and nothing online either.

So I called them, explained everything, and the short answer was to back everything up to a separate drive for safety. Then put the older mirrored drive in to have it resync. Remember-they are only off by a few meg. Now I had a backup anyway because Raid 1 doesn’t save you when you from deleting things, it just deletes it twice. The problem was that my backup was more than 24 hours old which would mean a multi-hour backup prior to getting the mirrored drive back up to snuff.

I’m paranoid, because drives always fail when their is no backup, never the other way around, so I backed it up again. Once done I was instructed to put the mirrored drive in hot. I did that and I got “this drive is unreadable, do you want to initialize it? Mac message. Click NO. Call back CalDigit and explain what happened and they tell me to put it in JBOD and try again. This time both drives show up. Good. I can see the one and only extra file on the drive and copy it over. Power down. Turn back to Level 1. Power up and now the whole thing wants to be initialized. At this point I had already lost multiple billable hours.

So I called them back and was told to go back to JBOD. I did and the drives showed up again, Phew, and I had my backup too. So what to do. They said remove the good drive for safe keeping, the one that had the data originally written to it, and then reinitialize the older part of the mirror. Did that.

Unmount new initialized drive. Power down, move dial back to Level one insert both drives and power up. I should see blue lights flash indicating that the mirror was rebuilding. I said that will take hours since it was hundreds of gigs. Can I work on while it is doing this? No. Don’t do that – more billable hours gone. But wait, it stopped flashing while on the phone. Why? because the raid successfully rebuilt the drive to ZERO data. In essence it copied the newly formatted directory right over and on top of the good old one in one blink.

So I then spent the next few hours as my backup dutifully moved everything back to the Caldigit VR.

Yes I was upset, and all I really want CalDigit to do is fully document both in a manual, downloadable PDF and FAQ is the proper way to not get burned with a hardware raid in level 1. I was lucky to have a backup. I can only imagine the horror of a customer if they had been solely relying on the mirror to keep them out of danger – then to lose it because their was no way to instruct the mirror which drive was the master, or good unit.

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